A Collection of Poems & Songs. [Bound with:] The Murdered Stranger. A Poem. To Which is Added, And Address to The Reader, and the Stranger?s Epitaph.

FIRST EDITIONS, 8vo, pp. viii, 116; 8. Contemporary red cloth, boards blocked with blind frames, front board lettered centrally direct in gilt. 12 leaves of binders? blanks to rear. Just a touch of spotting. Binding a little rubbed. Ownership inscription of John J. Clark, High Bogside, Beith to flyleaf dated 1891, seemingly-incomplete inscription to blank between works. Two scarce provincially-printed poetical works from Beith in Ayrshire, bound together. The first represents the collected works of James Sirratt the postmaster of Dalry, as gathered in manuscript form by the publisher. It includes several verses recited at Burns? Night celebrations in the 1820s. Library Hub records three copies, all north of the border: NLS, Glasgow and Edinburgh. The second, much shorter publication is a short piece of doggerel, written, per its title-page ?by John Fulton, Weaver in Beith, on the occasion of the mangled remains of a man being found, in a Plantation, situated at a short distance from the Public Road, near Risk in the Parish of Lochwinnoch, in the month of September, 1821.? Library Hub records only a second edition, with no publisher details or year of publication, in the BL, with a very similar but not identical note to the title-page which dates the discovery of the body to January. Worldcat adds just a single copy of this first edition, in Columbia. This copy has an odd and seemingly unfinished contemporary inscription to the blank facing the title-page concerning the will of Robert, Lord Boyd (1595-1628).…