Legends of the Library at Lilies, by the Lord and Lady there … Vol. I[–II]. London: Printed for Longman, Rees, Orme, Browne, Green, & Longman … 1832.

First edition. Lord Nugent (1788–1850) ‘inherited the Grenville aptitude for literary and scholarly pursuits … [and was] a competent classicist and historian: he became an FSA in 1825, and his long-contemplated and ardently sympathetic Some Memorials of John Hamp-den [c.1595–1643, another Buckinghamshire political figure], his Party and his Times (1831), the standard exposition of civil-war parliamentary propaganda, had still not been superseded over a century and a half later … His residence, Lilies, near Aylesbury, became a popular venue for literary men and politicians’ (Oxford DNB). The house is better known in the bookselling world as the former home and business address (‘probably England’s largest bookshop’, Sheila Markham) of the bookseller, Peter Eaton (1914–1993). The present work comprises eighteen short ‘legends’ by the Nugents, signed either ‘G’ or ‘L’, sometimes both, to indicate who was the author. It is unusual to find a book jointly written by husband and wife. 2 vols, 12mo (189 × 113 mm), pp. vi, [2], 359, [1]; [4], 350; some very light browning, the occasional spot; nineteenth-century green half calf, cloth sides, marbled endpapers and edges, extremities rubbed, small gouge mark at head of upper board to vol. I.…