Metamorphoses Volume, First Edition (7 results)

Soft cover. Condition: Very Good. 1st Edition. Very good, clean, tight condition. Text free of marks. Professional book dealer since 1999. All orders are processed promptly and carefully packaged with tracking.

Softcover. Condition: Near Fine. Periodical. Illustrated with color plates. Glossy wrappers. Tiny soil mark on foredge, near fine. Includes two poems by Ted Hughes in parallel English and Macedonian text.

Card Wrappers. Condition: Near Fine. First Edition. pp. xvi, 59; (ii), 56. Tiny name at head of each book's first page. No slipcase.

Softcover. Condition: Fine. Vol. 12, a double issue. Octavo. 270pp. Tiny cover crease else fine in glossy wrappers. With a CD of Basque, Catalan, Galician, Irish, and Welsh poems and songs bound in, as issued. Journal of poetry and prose in translation.

Leather Binding. Condition: Very Good. No Jacket. First Edition. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" Volume I only. First appearance of this translation. xlviii+[2]+340 pages. Bound in period brown speckled calf, spine expertly rebacked in brown polished calf with remains of original spine label, marbled endpapers (bookplate of Exeter Academy - but no other markings thus; ink name). Corners are rubbed; occasional foxing.

Printed wrappers. First Edition. Edition limited to 20 numbered copies; this set is #16. Printed on watercolor paper with glassine dustwrappers. Comes in cardboard boxes with silk ribbon. Each volume contains five engraved bookplates protected by tissue paper. Volume I is in near fine condition with some light scattered foxing throughout. Volume 2 is in fine condition. Boxes show light wear. ; Octavo.

Two volumes, 8vo, pp. viii, 60, [4] subscribers, 248; [iv], iv, 312; including two engraved plates in volume I, and a frontispiece portrait in volume II; each volume with the same 16pp. bookseller's catalogue at end; bound in contemporary calf gilt, red and green lettering pieces (joints slightly cracked). First edition of both volumes. The collected writings of a precocious young man who for a short time eked out a living on the fringes of the London literary world. William Pattison (1706-1727) was the son of a Sussex farmer who leased his land from the Earl of Thanet. The boy showed promise at an early age, and was helped to go to school in Westmorland. In time he began to write verse to secure patronage, and he ended up with a place as a sizar at Sidney-Sussex College, Cambridge. University life, however, proved uncongenial, and after clipping his name from the college books so that he could not be shown to have been sent down, Pattison drifted off to London to pursue a career as a poet. He had high hopes but little money. In what is now perhaps his best-known poem, Effigies Authoris (I 224-231), he describes spending the night on a bench in St. James's Park: the lonely vigil ends with his discovering sixpence in his pocket, which he uses to buy some shelter, and time and leisure to write the poem which he then addresses to the Earl of Burlington, and sends to his house at Chiswick. Most of what is known of Pattison derives from a long biographical sketch in the first volume here, which George Sherburn (Correspondence of Pope, II 440) describes as 'a vivid document in the methods of Grub-Street existence'. From this account it is clear that Pattison spent a good deal of time lounging about the bookshop of Edmund Curll, and here he came to know such professional writers as Walter Harte, Matthew Concanen, and Laurence Eusden the last of these at that time the faintly ridiculous Poet Laureate. Curll himself obviously took a shine to the youngster, and at some point, when Pattison was preparing a volume of his verse for publication by subscription, but at the same time running out of funds, Curll took him home, and gave him a bed. Here he contracted smallpox, and died suddenly, at the age of 21. Pope later circulated the rumour that Curll had starved Pattison to death, but this was simply malice: that Curll was fond of the young man is evident from the very existence of these two posthumous volumes, and from the accompanying memoir, which Curll may well have written himself. Pattison was inevitably later compared to such prodigies as Chatterton, and even Keats, but he is, of course, not in the same class. There are, however, individual pieces of considerable interest, such as a satirical sketch of college life that opens the first volume, or an ambitious imitation of Pope's Eloisa to Abelard. In his short life Pattison published only nine of the poems printed here: these are all marked in the contents with an asterisk. Of these just one, an ode on the accession of George II was printed separately; the rest were scattered in various miscellanies. The first volume contains a four-page list of subscribers; among the 126 names are Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Eustace Budgell, Aaron Hill, Walter Harte, the painter Jonathan Richardson, Laurence Eusden, 'Orator' Henley, the printer Henry Woodfall, and, most notably, Alexander Pope. Two plates are included in the pagination, one of them engraved by Michael Vander Gucht after a design by P. La Vergne (who was employed by Curll). The portrait in the second volume is engraved by Paul Fourdrinier after a drawing by P. Saunders, who appears in the other volume as a 'crayon painter', subscribing for one of the copies on fine paper. At the back of each volume is a catalogue of books for sale by Arthur Bettesworth, who no doubt purchased a number of sets from Curll at a discount. Foxon p. 560. These two volumes do not inevitably turn up as a pair, and the second one is very uncommon: ESTC reports both volumes in only seven libraries (BL, NLS and Bodleian in the UK; and Clark, Kansas, Texas and Rice in the USA). See also Baines and Rogers, Edmund Curll bookseller (2007), pp. 183-6.