[Rarebooks] fa: LORD CHESTERFIELD, SANITIZED: Maxims, or A New Plan of Education - 1786

[ArCh]

Auction ends Sunday, October 29. Images and more details can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

https://tinyurl.com/ymdoqaee

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield: Lord Chesterfield's Maxims: or, A New Plan of Education, on the Principles of Virtue and Politeness. In which the exceptionable Parts of that Noble Lord's Letters to his Son are carefully rejected, and such only are preserved as cannot fail to form the Man of Honour, the Man of Virtue, and the Accomplished Gentleman. A new edition. London: Printed for E. Newbery, the Corner of St. Paul's Church-Yard, 1786. Small 8vo (16 cm) in later full red morocco, beveled edges, boards, spine and turn-ins elaborately decorated in gilt, all page edges gilt; [2], xii, [2] pp.; with an engraved portrait frontispiece, final leaf of publisher's adverts. Gulick 116; ESTC T81037.

A heavily edited/bowdlerized collection of Lord Chesterfield's words of advice to his son, scrupulously cleansed of all improprieties (those bits that Samuel Johnson famously condemned for promoting "the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing-master"), and appropriately housed in the sort of Victorian binding often used for devotional books and other edifying works.

Binding with some rubbing and light staining, front board nearly detached; penciled gift inscription (dated 1873) to the front free-endpaper, penciled (erasable) underlinings to the title-page and elsewhere in the text, leaves lightly toned with occasional faint spotting, else quite clean and fresh. Front paste-down with the modern bookplate of antiquarian bookseller Peter Stewart Young, Tillingham.