The Master-Cat; or, Puss in Boots. By the Author of "Old Friends in a New Dress."

[SHARPE, RICHARD SCRAFTON].

Published by London: Printed and Sold by R. Dutton, Gracechurch Street, 1808.

About this Item

16pp., 16mo (4¾ x 4 inches). Engraved frontispiece and seven plates. Neatly bound in a mid-nineteenth-century collector s binding of roan-backed marbled boards, spine gilt-lettered; upper joint partly split. With the handsome circular morocco gilt "E.H." bookplate of Edward Hailstone on the front pastedown. First edition of this poetical version by Sharpe, an author deserving much fuller investigation than he has so far received. His Old Friends in a New Dress is a fine poetical version of Aesop, many times reprinted, and he also seems to have been the author of Anecdotes and Adventures of Fifteen Gentlemen, 1821, one of the first books of English limericks. The present charming poem seems to be the first separately-printed nineteenth-century English edition of "Puss in Boots." It received a friendly notice in The Antijacobin Review and Magazine, September 1808: "Puss in Boots furnishes a good practical moral never to despair, but `always hope and act the best, in whatever situation of life young persons may be placed." Osborne Collection, p. 41; two other copies (Ocean State and Princeton) in OCLC; no copy in JISC/COPAC. Seller Inventory # 13219

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Master-Cat; or, Puss in Boots. By the ...

Publisher: London: Printed and Sold by R. Dutton, Gracechurch Street, 1808.

Binding: Soft cover