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Printed at the Dunedin Press Ltd., Edinburgh. Limited to 200 copies on antique, (laid) paper. Hard cover, 4to (measuring 8 x 10 ¼ inches,) with beveled edged boards, in original publisher's red cloth with a circlet of gilt foliage to top board, and gilt titles to the spine. Top edge gilt, others untrimmed. Xxvii, 144, (2). Condition: Very Good Plus. Small areas of soiling to boards. Spine, and a strip of the rear board near the spine, are sunned. One bumped corner. Bright and clean within. Containing photographic reproductions of many title pages. British book collector and bibliographer, Thomas J. Wise, (1859-1937) produced this work from items in his own obsessively-obtained personal stash, here known as the Ashley Library. Although he published a number of legitimate bibliographical books over the years, and managed to ingratiate himself into the goodwill and acquaintance of various authors such as Edmund Gosse, and even became President of London's Bibliographical Society, Wise was, in the end, revealed in the 1930's as a forger and thief of numerous materials from books held at the British Library. (See John Collins's book, The Two Forgers, Oak Knoll, 1992, about the co-conspiracies of Wise and Harry Buxton Forman. Specifically, he and Forman were implicated in the "creative" forgeries of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets From the Portuguese "1847," and denounced for various fraudulently-presented pamphlets by William Morris, Swinburne, the Brontës, and others.) Despite the scandal, Wises's Ashley Library was sold to the British Museum by his widow, soon after his death. An interesting object lesson for the overly-excitable bibliophile.
Ref: BIBL 8567
$375.00