[Rarebooks] fa: WILLIAM BECKFORD - ITALY; with Sketches of SPAIN AND PORTUGAL - 2 vols. 1834

[ArCh]

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Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA


William Beckford:] Italy; with Sketches of Spain and Portugal. By the Author of "Vathek." London: Richard Bentley, 1834. FIRST EDITION. Two volumes, 8vo (22 cm), in early/period half calf and marbled boards, spines tooled in gilt, gilt-lettered morocco spine labels; [iii]-xvi, 371 pp.; [iii]-xv, 381 pp. Bound without the half-titles. Bindings with some rubbing, wear to the extremities, shallow chipping to the spine heads; mild toning to the edges of the text blocks; occasional scattered spots, mostly light; three or four leaves with more pronounced foxing; else clean and sound, firmly and appealingly bound. Front paste-downs with the early ownership signatures of C. [?.] Williams Wynn.

First edition of Beckford's epistolary account of a European tour taken some forty years earlier, "written in the bloom and heyday of youthful spirits and youthful confidence, at a period when the old order of things existed with all its picturesque pomps and absurdities..." William Beckford (1760-1844) was a true English eccentric, one of the most scandalous and exotic figures of his day. Author, aesthete, collector, and arbiter of taste, he was a sort of late-Georgian Oscar Wilde-cum-Nancy Mitford. When his father, a former Lord Mayor of London, died, he became the richest commoner in England at the age of 10. Hounded out of the country after a youthful indiscretion with the future Earl of Devon, he spent years in self-imposed exile on the Continent, then decades more as a near-recluse in Fonthill Abbey, the immense neo-Gothic "folly" he designed and built for himself. A long-time Member of Parliament who never went near Parliament, he spent much of his time accumulating one of the most spectacular collections of paintings, books, and objets d'art in England. His best-known literary work is Vathek, the first and best example of the Oriental-Gothic novel.