[Rarebooks] fa: LORD BYRON - ENGLISH BARDS AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS 1809 - First Edition/First Issue

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, April 2. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

http://tinyurl.com/ll5gs8c

Thanks,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA


[George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron:] English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers. London: Printed for James Cawthorn, [1809]. FIRST EDITION, first issue. Slim 8vo (18.5 cm) in nineteenth-century morocco and marbled boards, top page edges gilt, marbled endpapers; vi + 54 pp.; with the half-title page. Wise I, 21; Hayward 219; CBEL III, 277. Randolph p14.

With all the points of the first issue, as per Randolph: the words "Despatch" and "wizard's" on p. 5, "crouds" on p. 47, and "Author" in line 4 of the preface, and with the paper watermarked "1805" (on leaf D2, pp. 29-30). Very light toning/yellowing to the leaves, otherwise clean, crisp and fresh, firmly bound. Front paste-down with the gilt-tooled oval leather bookmark of Joseph L. Lilienthal.

A nice copy of the true first edition of Byron's first great literary success and first work of satire. Begun as a pointed jab at the editor of the Edinburgh Review, which had panned his earlier collection of poems, Hours of Idleness, the work evolved into a witty and wildly indiscriminate attack on nearly all the poets of the Romantic Movement, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Sir Walter Scott, M.G. "Monk" Lewis, etc. Byron later disavowed the work, moving to suppress its publication in 1816.