Brief Lives: A Selection Based upon Existing Contemporary Portraits

Second printing. Tan cloth with gilt lettering and decoration. 324 pages. Portraits. No slipcase. A clean, attractive copy. "John Aubrey's Brief Lives is one of the strangest books -- if indeed this collection of notes, excerpts, gossip and dry facts can be called a book -- to have achieved literary fame. Their author was equally strange, in his way: a gentleman with the learned turn of mind, yet little formal education, a lover of books and manuscripts, yet almost penniless, a would-be scholar who loved worldly company as much as that of serious men, who spent the last twenty years of his life living in other people's houses, on the run from his creditors.