[Rarebooks] fa: THOMAS FLATMAN - POEMS AND SONGS 1674 - First Edition

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, May 1. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

http://tinyurl.com/j635f58

All auctions with starting bids of $24.99.

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI


Thomas Flatman: Poems and Songs. London: Printed by S. and B. G[riffin]. for Benjamin Took at the Ship in St. Pauls Church-yard, and Jonathan Edwin at the three Roses in Ludgate Street, 1674. FIRST EDITION. Small 8vo (17 cm) in early speckled calf, rebacked with later, but not recent, calf tooled in gilt, marbled endpapers, page edges dyed yellow; [36], 140 pp.; frontispiece portrait by Robert White after Hayls. ESTC R7358; Wing F1151; Wither to Prior 356.

This first edition was issued without a frontispiece, so the portrait here (trimmed and mounted) is a bonus, probably added from a copy of the second or third edition of the work (see ESTC R35545, R37387). Bound without the blanks, as often; leaves mildly toned, small wormholes in lower blank margin, loss to lower corner of leaf F1 not affecting text, intermittent damp-stain to the edges of the last 15 leaves, occasional scattered light soiling, else quite clean and sound, firmly bound. Uncommon in the first edition.

Thomas Flatman (1637-88) was an accomplished miniature painter as well as a poet. This, the only collection of his verses published in his lifetime, includes the still much admired "Death, a Song" and "A Thought on Death," the latter imitated by no less a poet than Alexander Pope. Prefixed to Flatman's poems are commendatory verses by Walter Pope (only in this first edition), Charles Cotton, Francis Knollis, and others.