[Rarebooks] fa: 1806 WILLIAM BLAKE & BENJAMIN HEATH MALKIN - A FATHER'S MEMOIRS OF HIS CHILD

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, along with other illustrated works, auctions ending Sunday, February 3. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/ba9hgsg

Thanks,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.

Benjamin Heath Malkin: A Father's Memoirs of His Child. London: Printed for Longman [et al] by T. Bensley, 1806. FIRST EDITION. Tall 8vo (24.5 cm), untrimmed in later pebbled cloth; [4], xlviii, 172 pp.; with the half-title, engraved frontispiece and three additional engraved plates, including a folding map. Keynes 80.

Benjamin Heath Malkin's memoir of his son who died at the age of six and was something of a prodigy: included are examples of the boy's poetry and letters as well as a map of an imaginary country he created ("Allestone"). Even more significant is the book's importance to collectors and students of William Blake. Malkin, a friend and patron of Blake, not only commissioned him to design the frontispiece, but also devoted much of his 48-page introduction to an account of the artist and his life, the earliest biography of Blake. "It represents the first accurate description of his youth and early career, undoubtedly derived from Blake himself… There is also more than a trace of Blake's own opinions in Malkin's attack upon those sceptics and rationalists who have disparaged the poet: 'By them, in short, he has been stigmatised as an engraver, who might do tolerably well, if he was not mad.' This is the first direct reference to his 'madness', no doubt broached by the poet himself, and suggests the way he must have complained to his friends about his neglect" (Peter Ackroyd, Blake, 1995). The introduction also features the first letterpress printing of five of Blake's poems: The Tiger, Laughing Song, The Divine Image, Holy Thursday, and Song (I love the jocund dance). As much a gracious tribute to his eccentric friend as to the memory of his son, Malkin's book provided early impetus to a greater appreciation of Blake's work and was, until the publication of Gilchrist's Life of William Blake in 1863, the primary source on Blake's life and poetry for the reading public.

A small piece broken off from the top fore-corner of the front board with some modest bumping to the same corner of the first 6 leaves; two or three light penciled (erasable) notes in the margins by an early owner; a few occasional small spots and touches of soiling; otherwise the contents are quite clean, with nice wide margins, firmly bound. Front paste-down with the armorial bookplate of "MDH, Cheswardine," presumably one of the Donaldson-Hudson family of Cheswardine Hall, Shropshire. Loosely laid in is a copy of an email from the late great Peter Howard, proprietor of Serendipity Books, describing this book to a customer: "All edges untrimmed… Fresh and clean… It is a fantastic book, first long account of Blake by a contemporary, with engraving by Blake PLUS PLUS the first public printing of TIGER, TIGER and other verse… The astonishing thing is that the child had created and his father prints for the first time: 1) "A Fable Named The Horse and Master" 2) and "A History of Allestone" an imaginary world… with an engraved map present of all the imagined shires etc, exactly like Tolkein, and the boy tells his story in letters… This is a great book, early for Blake, and unstudied with re to the child's orig creation (however modest one might think it.)…"