Oxford by Attributed (3 results)

[xxxii], 156, [4]pp., 8vo. With a preliminary advertisement leaf ("the second Part is now in the Press"), and four pages of publisher s advertisements at end. Some browning and spotting as usual, but a good large copy in late eighteenth-century half calf over marbled boards, spine gilt-ruled with a label; upper joint partly split. On the front pastedown is a small old paper tag with a manuscript note "Bought at W.H. Crawford s Sale at Sotheby s 16.3.91." First and only edition (despite the preliminary notice no "second part" ever appeared), variously attributed to Daniel Defoe and to Thomas Price, with ESTC noting the "attribution to Defoe probably erroneous." The narrator has to leave Oxford University for want of funds and becomes a travelling beggar. He takes up with a mountebank selling quack remedies, and then an itinerant mock-parson; both of them dupe and rob him. He learns to beg from the gentry by sending appeals in verse, and then is taken up by a clergyman in Northamptonshire and ordained a deacon. But the clergyman has a sister: here my Cruel Step-mother, Fortune, begins again to try her Experiments upon me: From this very Instant this poor young Gentlewoman espouses a particular Tenderness and Esteem for me; which she so long unhappily fosters and cherishes in her breast, that at length by degrees it swell d into a violent and passionate Love. And so the mendicant, unwilling to take advantage, sets off again, after more adventures becoming a contented shepherd in Dorset until his own literacy betrays him and he is suspected of being a Jesuit spy. Wing, Short-Title Catalogue, 1641-1700, C5646B; Mish, English Prose Fiction 1600-1700, pp. 87-88, treating the work as by Defoe. W.H. Crawford s was one of the major libraries dispersed in the 1890s; Seymour de Ricci, English Collectors of Books, p. 165, refers to it as "the sale of the great library of manuscripts, incunabula and other rare volumes, formed from 1870 onwards by William Horatio Crawford of Lakelands, County Cork.".

Condition: Good. Print: 16.5 x 12 cm. Plate: 19 x 16.5 cm. Paper: 25 x 22 cm. Spot in right margin.Forgery purporting to be a trade-card for James Figg, prize fighter and instructor in sword and quarter-staff; portrait of Figg standing full-length, one hand on his hip, the other on the hilt of his sword, with another man to left of him holding a quarter-staff, in a raised fighting ring with spectators; in a decorative border with crossed swords above, a man with a sword to either side and an inscription plaque with weapons below. The plates were bought by the publisher Baldwin, Cradock and Joy at the Boydell sale in 1818. The Works of William Hogarth as published by Baldwin, Cradock and Joy in 1822 with the original plates restored by James Heath, engraver to His Majesty. The Heath edition was the last to print directly from Hogarth's original engraved plates.

Willdey's map of Oxford Engraved map. A rare map of Oxford with a unique design. George Willdey (?1671-1737) was a flamboyant London shopkeeper and self-publicist. His principal business was as a toy-man and seller of luxury goods, jewellery, gold and silver trinkets, and china. However, he was perhaps the first mapseller to widen the appeal of maps from an intellectual elite to the general public; the interesting shape and 'fun facts' on the present example show his attempts to broaden their appeal. Willdey's map of Oxford was part of a series of separately issued maps showing countries across Europe, as well as London, Oxford and Cambridge. This series is most commonly attributed to Samuel Parker, on the grounds that the map of England and Wales bears his signature, and several other maps show his distinctive style. All of these maps are formatted in the same unique way, with the central image contained in an oval set against a dark background, and all four corners containing three roundels of text. The black borders are most rare because of the amount of work required to create large black areas by engraving lines. This map is extremely rare. There are two known composite atlases, compiled around 1721 and 1790, which contain Willdey's map of Oxford, but we have otherwise been unable to trace any further examples.