[Rarebooks] fa: Benjamin Oakley: LETTERS ON MISCELLANEOUS & DOMESTIC SUBJECTS 1823 - EARLY LITHOGRAPHY - ONE of 50 COPIES - INSCRIBED

[ArCh]

Auction ending Sunday, October 30. No reserve. Images and more details can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

https://tinyurl.com/shwwe357

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA


[Benjamin Oakley:] Letters on Miscellaneous and Domestic Subjects: Intended for the Use of the Writer's Family, and a Few Select Friends. Only Fifty Copies printed. London: Printed [for the author] by J. Moyes, Greville Street, 1823. First and only edition, tall 8vo (26.5 cm) in original marbled boards with paper spine label; xii + 384 pp.; with 13 lithograph portraits, tissue guards.

PRESENTATION COPY, inscribed on the title page by the author. Includes letters to, from, or about Thomas Frognall Dibdin, Edmund Kean, John Philip Kemble, Sir John Soane, and others. Soane was also a recipient of an inscribed presentation copy, and it is from the website of Sir John Soane's Museum that the following brief sketch of the author is gleaned: "Benjamin Oakley was a stockbroker with a taste for private theatricals, drawing and lithography. His enthusiasm for Shakespeare was shared with Soane and their mutual friend John Britton. The printer James Moyes, also Soane's printer, was Oakley's son-in-law."

Privately printed in an edition of "only fifty copies," hence, quite rare. OCLC WorldCat locates only two copies in libraries worldwide (Harvard, British Library). The portraits, early examples of the use of lithography for book illustration, were executed by Oakley himself. The binding is original, matching the description of the copy held at Soane's Museum, but is in rather rough shape, with rubbing and edge-wear, upper and lower portions of the backstrip missing, front and rear boards held only by the cords. The contents, however, are very good or better, with some mild toning to a few plates and the edges of the text block, and a few scattered light touches of soiling. Front paste-down with the handsome modern bookplate of Dutch bibliophile Helge Loewenberg Domp.