[Rarebooks] fa: THOMAS DIBDIN - REMINISCENCES OF A LITERARY LIFE 1836 - 1st Ed./Riviere Bindings

[ArCh]

Listed now, auctions ending Sunday, March 17. Images and more details can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

http://tinyurl.com/y42bxmll

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Thomas Frognall Dibdin: Reminiscences of a Literary Life. London: John Major, 1836. FIRST EDITION. Two volumes, 8vo (22 cm), bound by R. Riviere in nineteenth-century full tree calf, spines tooled and lettered in gilt, marbled page-edges and endpapers; xxxii, [4], 556 pp.; [2], 557-982 pp.; with a portrait frontispiece plus nine engraved plates, and a number of in-text woodcuts (complete).

Charming and idiosyncratic memoir of the author's peregrinations during a life spent examining old libraries and rare books. Thomas Frognall Dibdin (1776-1847), bibliographer and librarian to Lord Spencer at Althorpe, was the first secretary of the Roxburghe Club, estab. 1812, now the world's oldest bibliophile society. His Bibliomania (1809) probably did more than any other work to inspire the nineteenth-century passion for old books and rare editions.

Bindings with some scattered rubbing, wear to the corners and spine ends, rubbing to the joints, some of which are a little tender but secure; contents with offsetting from some of the plates, a few scattered small spots, else very clean and sound, firmly bound. Front paste-downs with the small contemporary labels of “G. Simmons, Bookseller, Stationer & Music Seller, 63 Edgeware Road.”