[Rarebooks] fa: PERCY - RELIQUES OF ANCIENT ENGLISH POETRY 1839 - 3 vols. in Fine Bindings

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, October 23. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

http://tinyurl.com/jjxnbro

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA


Thomas Percy, ed.: Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and Other Pieces of our Earlier Poets: Together with Some Few of Later Date. A New Edition. In Three Volumes. London: L.A. Lewis, 1839. Three volumes, 8vo (20 cm), bound in full calf with elaborately gilt-tooled spines, gilt-lettered morocco spine labels, marbled endpapers and page edges; engraved vignettes.

A handsome edition of this perennially popular and influential collection of old broadside ballads, poems and folk songs first published in 1765 and reprinted innumerable times over the next two centuries. Bishop Percy is credited with having rescued from oblivion such important ballads as Chevy Chase, The Nut-Brown Maid, Lillibullero, etc., as well as Scottish border ballads and a number of songs about Robin Hood and King Arthur. A foundational text of the Romantic Movement, "several generations of poets felt its influence: Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Rossetti, Morris, Swinburne, and many lesser lights. Scott, both as novelist and ballad-editor, owed a debt to the book, as did figures such as Bürger, Herder, and the Grimm brothers in Germany, and by extension European Romanticism in general" (ODNB).

Boards and extremities with a few very modest touches of rubbing and wear; contents lightly toned, former owners ink signature on the front free-endpapers; otherwise very clean and tight in handsome calf bindings decorated in the style of the eighteenth-century. A pretty set.