[Rarebooks] fa: JOKE UPON JOKE - Scarce Early Joke Book w/ Engravings - 1800

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, June 19. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

http://tinyurl.com/jj9n2rw

Thanks,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA


Joke upon Joke, Or the Last Packet from the Land of Festivity and Mirth, Containing a Select Collection of the best Bon-mots, Repartees, Sprightly Sayings, Humourous Jokes, &c. &c. Solely calculated as the best Antidote to the Spleen, Melancholy & Listlessness. London: Printed for H.D. Symonds, Novr. 1st., 1800. Tall 12mo (18.5 cm) in later, but not recent, half plum morocco and matching moiré cloth, gilt spine titles; [4], [9]-279, [1] pp.; engraved title-page and 5 plates (complete).

Uncommon early edition of this collection of jokes, puns, humorous verse and culturally insensitive anecdotes. OCLC locates only one other example in a library or institution (SF Public Library) and ESTC finds only two libraries (Harvard, Oxford) holding an edition of the same year and with the same title and erratic pagination, but with the imprint of T. Hurst and only one plate. Modest rubbing and sunning to the binding; frontispiece laid down with browning and marginal damp-stain to it and the engraved title-page opposite, bleed-through from an early ink signature on the verso of the frontis.; contents with intermittent spotting, mostly light and relegated to the fore-edge margins; one joke marked by an early owner as "a good one" (it isn't, particularly); else quite clean and sound, firmly bound.