[Rarebooks] fa: THE LITERARY LIFE OF THE LATE THOMAS PENNANT 1793 - Fine Copy with All the Plates

[ArCh]

Auction ending Sunday, November 21. Images and more details can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

https://tinyurl.com/266djh8u

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA


Thomas Pennant: The Literary Life of the late Thomas Pennant, Esq. By Himself. London: Sold by Benjamin and John White, Fleet-Street, and Robert Faulder, New Bond-Street, M.DCC.XCIII [1793]. First edition, 4to (24.5 cm), in early/period full speckled calf, spine elaborately decorated and lettered in gilt, marbled endpapers; [6] + 144 pp.; with 4 engraved plates, one folding and hand-colored. ESTC T845.

Complete with all four plates, and uncommon thus, including the portrait frontispiece after Thomas Gainsborough, the folding colored plate (often lacking), and the portrait of the Rev. John Lloyd, by Mazel ("to be had separate at Mr. Mazel's, No. 7, Bridges-Street, Covent-Garden"). Binding with very modest rubbing and edge-wear, front joint  professionally repaired at some point in the past; contents with light offsetting from the plates, a few faint spots and touches of soiling, else very clean and fresh. With the elaborately engraved armorial bookplate of the Earl of Carysfort. A handsome copy.

Thomas Pennant (1726-1798) was a Welsh naturalist, antiquarian, traveller and prolific writer whose principal works include A Tour in Scotland, and Voyage to the Hebrides (1774), British Zoology (1776-77), A Tour in Wales (1778), A History of Quadrupeds(1781), The Journey from Chester to London (1782), Arctic Zoology (1784), Some Account of London (1781), etc. The extensive appendices here include Pennant's essay, "Of the Patagonians," as well as "A Letter on the Ladies Affectation of Military Dress", "A Letter to a Member of Parliament on Mail Coaches," and other miscellaneous pieces. Pennant was in fact very much alive when this purportedly posthumous collection was published.