[Rarebooks] fa: "PHIZ" (Hablot K. Browne): A Memoir - EXTRA-ILLUSTRATED/PRESENTATION COPY - 1882

[ArCh]

Auction ends Sunday, March 26. Images and more details can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

https://tinyurl.com/5n75n6u7

Many thanks,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA


Fred G. Kitton: "Phiz" (Hablot Knight Browne) : A Memoir. Including a Selection from his Correspondence and Notes on his Principal Works... With a Portrait and numerous Illustrations. London: W. Satchell & Co., 1882. First edition, 8vo (22 cm), in full calf binding by Charles E. Lauriat, Boston, with gilt-tooled borders, turn-ins and spine decorations, gilt-lettered morocco spine labels, marbled endpapers, top page edges gilt.

PRESENTATION COPY, inscribed to Sir Edward R. Russell, 1st Baron Russell of Liverpool, by the artist's son, Edgar Browne, and featuring the latter's marginal annotations regarding his father. EXTRA-ILLUSTRATED with (according to a penciled note on the front endpaper) "22 original engravings from the first issue of Pickwick, Nickleby, Dombey & other important works illustrated by 'Phiz'...as well as the original cover for A Tale of Two Cities [and Barrington by Charles Lever]." Bound in at the rear is Russell's own copy (with his signature on the front wrap) of the Catalogue of the Memorial Exhibition of the Works of the late Hablot K. Browne ("Phiz")...at the Liverpool Art Club (1883). The original wraps for both the Memoir and the Catalogue are also bound in.

Hablot K. Browne, aka "Phiz" (1815-1882), was one of the leading English book illustrators of the nineteenth century, best known for his long collaboration with Charles Dickens, beginning with the Pickwick Papers in 1836. His son, Edgar Athelstane Browne (1840-1917) was an eminent surgeon, anatomist, and ophthamologist based in Liverpool. He later wrote his own memoir of his father and his most famous collaborator, Phiz and Dickens (1913). Sir Edward Russell (1834-1920) was a newspaperman, longtime editor of the Liverpool Daily Post, and Liberal MP. He was made Baron Russell of Liverpool in 1919. He, too, published a memoir, That Reminds Me, in 1899.

Among the younger Browne's marginalia is an observation on the frontispiece portrait of his father: "Very like - as the man would look with features set to attain photographic immortality. Front part of the head was not bald but thinly covered with hair -..." Elsewhere, at a place in the text describing the onset of an "attack of rheumatism" in his father's hands, he writes: "The beginning of the end - the spread of the paralysis." Etc.

Binding with minor wear to the edges, rubbing to the front joint which is cracking at the top, but secure; mild toning to the leaves, one plate with a small chip from the fore-edge, else clean and sound, firmly bound. A handsome presentation of a unique association copy.