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John Dryden, and Lady Diana Beauclerc (illus.).. The fables of John Dryden, ornamented with engravings from the pencil of the Right Hon. Lady Diana Beauclerc.. London: printed by T. Bensley for J. Edwards and E. Harding, 1797.

Price: US$285.90 + shipping

Condition: Very Good

Description: 1st ed. 4to, xviii, 241p, illus. Pages 237/238 and 239/240 duplicated. Bound without the half-title. Contemp. red leather with gilt rules to panels and spine, with title and date in gilt to spine. Book plate to front pastedown. Some abrasions to leather and worn at corners but still a very attractive binding. Lacking 4 of the original 9 plates, but including the 15 head and tail pieces. Some light marginal spotting to plates, else an exceptionally bright, unmarked copy.

Seller: WestField Books, York, United Kingdom

Dryden, John. Dryden's Fables. T Bensley, 1797.

Price: US$649.99 + shipping

Condition: Very Good

Description: First Edition, First Printing (Date of 1797 on title page). Published by T. Bensley, 1797. Folio. Bound in three-quarter dark blue morocco over blue cloth boards with marbled endpapers and gilt topstain. Five raised spine bands with stamped gilt lettering to spine. Binding circa 1900. Book is in very good condition. Spine straight, binding tight and all pages intact. Has some light spotting and offsetting to some pages. Some moderate wear/tears to corners. Small tear along right side of front flyleaf. Complete with 9 full-page plates and 15 smaller head and tail illustrations throughout. A very good copy of this classic edition featuring the illustrations of Lady Diana Beauclerc. 241 pages. Book has been placed in a custom acetate protector. 100% positive feedback. 30 day money back guarantee. NEXT DAY SHIPPING! Excellent customer service. Please email with any questions or if you would like a photo. All books packed carefully and ship with free delivery confirmation/tracking. All books come with free bookmarks. Ships from Southampton, New York.

Seller: Southampton Books, Southampton, NY, U.S.A.

Dryden, John. The Fables of John Dryden, Ornamented with Engravings from the Pencil of the Right Hon. Lady Diana Beauclerc. T. Bensley, for J. Edwards, London, 1797.

Price: US$1250.00 + shipping

Condition: Very Good

Description: Folio. With bookplate of Princess Sophie, who was a daughter of King George III, and second plate of hers in slightly different style in back. Contemporary calf boards, more modern calf spine rebacking with original red title label attached thereto. xviii + 241 pp., 9 full page plates, some engraved by Bartolozzi, and also head and tail vignettes. Text pages very clean, except for offsetting, which is considerable in pages facing full page plates. Some plates are foxed in margins. A few tissue guards survive. All edges gilt. Some shelfwear to edges and corners of leather, with leather chipped or rubbed in corners. Overall, attractive volume and VG.

Seller: White Fox Rare Books, ABAA/ILAB, New York, NY, U.S.A.

DRYDEN, John (1631-1700) - BEAUCLERC, Lady Diana (1734-1808).. The Fables.. London: T. Bensley for J. Edwards, 1797., 1797.

Price: US$2500.00 + shipping

Description: Folio (13 6/8 x 10 inches). Half-title. 9 engraved plates by Vandenburg after Lady Diana Beauclerc, and engraved head- and tail-piece vignettes by Bartolozzi and others after Lady Diana Beauclerc (some occasionally heavy spotting to plates). Contemporary tree calf, elaborately decorated with broad gilt borders, the centre of each cover with the gilt cipher 'EA' beneath a royal coronet, the spine in six compartments with five raised bands, one with black morocco lettering-piece, the others decorated with small gilt tools of musical instruments (extremities a little rubbed). Provenance: with the entwined cipher of Eugene de Beauharnais, son of Josephine de Beauharnais, the first wife of Napoleon Bonaparte, and Amalie Auguste de Baviere in the centre of each cover; sold Sotheby's London, 3rd July 1989, lot 146. A selection from Dryden's translation of some more famous classical poetry, first published in 1700, and beautifully illustrated by Lady Diana Beauclerk: "This collection (prefaced with another example of Dryden's brilliant comparative criticism [as here]) assembled versions of Homer, Chaucer, Ovid, and Boccaccio, demonstrating his mastery of diverse voices and tones, his narrative and argumentative skills, his philosophical vision and psychological insight. The Homeric translation catches the brutality of war and rapacious rulers; Ovid and Boccaccio provide opportunities to explore the mind under the stress of passion; while the poems from Chaucer show a gift for gentler ironies. In 'Of the Pythagorean philosophy' (from Ovid's Metamorphoses 15) Dryden brings a precise and vivid imagination to this exploration of change in the natural world, and in Theseus's speech at the end of 'Palamon and Arcite' (from Chaucer's 'The Knight's Tale') he interpolates a vision of man's place in a troubled but divinely ordered universe. Dryden lived long enough to see the Fables praised by the town, but died of gangrene on 1 May 1700 (apparently intestate), and was buried the following day in St Anne's Church, Soho. Belatedly, friends and patrons rallied to arrange a more appropriate funeral, for on 13 May he was reburied in Chaucer's grave in Westminster Abbey" (Paul Hammond for DNB). Lady Diana was primarily a portrait artist, but she is also known for "her enormous output of small drawings of fat cupids entangled in branches of grapes and little girls wearing mob caps gave place to larger and more ambitious groups of peasantry introduced into landscaped backgrounds. She worked chiefly in pen and ink, pastel, and watercolour. Essentially a designer, she successfully executed seven large panels in 'soot ink' (black wash), mounted on Indian blue damask and illustrating Horace Walpole's tragedy The Mysterious Mother. Apt to overrate her skills, Walpole placed these at Strawberry Hill in a specially designed hexagonal room named the Beauclerc closet. At the same time he opined absurdly that 'Salvator Rosa and Guido could not surpass their expression and beauty' (Anecdotes of Painting, 24.524). Lady Diana also enjoyed the patronage of Josiah Wedgwood, probably from 1785, when her designs, mostly those of laughing bacchanalian boys, were translated as bas-reliefs onto jasper ornaments, plates, and jugs; they proved to be enormously popular. In 1796 she illustrated the English translation of G. A. Burger's ballad Leonora and in 1797 The Fables of John Dryden; in both cases her illustrations were engraved mostly by Francesco Bartolozzi" (Virginia Surtees for DNB). Catalogued by Kate Hunter

Seller: Arader Galleries - AraderNYC, New York, NY, U.S.A.

[Fables]; Dryden, John [and] Bürger Gottfried Augustus; [Fine Binding]. THE FABLES OF JOHN DRYDEN [Bound with] LEONORA Translated from the German of Gottfried Augustus Bürger by W. R. Spencer. London By T. Bensley for J. Edwards and E. Harding 1797, 1796, 1797.

Price: US$8250.00 + shipping

Description: First edition thus of each title and a very early edition of LEONORA (Lenore), with fine provenance being from Condover Hall, the grandest manor house in Shropshire, and with at least two generations of lineage at Condover. First, with the manuscript ownership notation of Owen Smyth Owen, whose family owned the hall beginning with its construction circa 1598 and later with the fine engraved bookplate of Reginald Chomondeley, who owned Condover Hall when he was host to American writer Mark Twain in 1873. Both works ornamented with very fine engravings from the pencil of the Right Hon. Lady Diana Beauclerc, being nine plates engraved by Vandenburg, Bartolozzi, Chessman and others and with 15 engraved head and tail vignettes engraved by Bartolozzi and others within the FABLES, and 5 plates engraved by Bartolozzi and others and 4 very fine engraved vignette head pieces within LEONORA. The text of Lenore/Leonora given in both German and English, English on one page, German on the facing page. Folio, in a superb contemporary full Regency binding of red crushed morocco, both boards with a wide and elaborate gilt tooled frame in a chain-like pattern with inner frame of a rolled thistle device, the board edges gilt rolled and the turn-ins gilt tooled in Greek key. The spine elegantly decorated with six wide compartments between gilt stippled raised bands, each compartment beautifully gilt tooled around a large central gilt device, three compartments with large morocco gilt lettered and tooled labels in contrasting blue and green, one smaller gilt lettered label at the foot, marbled endpapers, a.e.g. xviii, 241; [v], 35 pp. The finest copy we have ever seen. A beautiful copy, the superb Regency binding fully original, unrestored and unsophisticated, the paper very fresh and clean, extremely minor and occasional scattered foxing only, much less then is typically seen on this title, in all very handsome and fine with excellent provenance. A BEAUTIFUL EDITION OF THESE GREAT WORKS, ILLUSTRATED WITH FINE ENGRAVINGS BY LADY DIANA BEAUCLERC AND IN AN EXCEPTIONALLY HANDSOME BINDING WITH THE PROVENANCE OF THE GRANDEST MANOR HOUSE IN SHROPSHIRE. The "Fables" are Dryden's rather free but very popular translations of portions of Chaucer, Boccaccio, the first book of the ILIAD, and parts of Ovid's METAMORPHOSES, as well as some original poems. The Preface, reprinted in this edition from the original can be considered some of Dryden’s most lively and unconstrained prose work. "I have endeavored to chose such fables, both ancient and modern, as contain in each of them some instructive moral, which I could prove by induction." Bürger’s Poem LENORE is generally characterized as a Gothic ballad, and although the character that returns from its grave in the poem is not considered to be a vampire, the poem has been very influential on two centuries of vampire literature. William Taylor, who published the first English translation of the ballad in 1790 for Monthly Magazine, would later claim that "no German poem has been so repeatedly translated into English as Ellenore". Percy Bysshe Shelley treasured a copy of the poem which he had handwritten himself. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Christabel was influenced by Bürger's Lenore. Influences of Bürger's poem on Keats and Wordsworth have also been noted and Lenore is also particularly famous for being cited by Bram Stoker in the early chapters of his novel Dracula. ‘A Royal manor in Anglo Saxon times, until the 16th century Condover Manor was in and out of Crown Tenure until, in 1586, Elizabeth I made a grant of the current Manor to Thomas Owen, a Member of Parliament and Recorder of Shrewsbury. Built out of pink sandstone, quarried at nearby Berriewood, Condover Hall has the typical Elizabethan two storey high ground floor rooms lit by tall windows with their regular mullions and double transoms. There are fine chimneys, gables and a good example of a strapwork frieze. The grounds are laid out in formal 17th century style with boxed yew hedges and sandstone balustraded terraces decorated with Italianate terracotta vases. Owned by the Owen family until the late 1860s the house then passed to the Cholmondeley family and Mary Cholmondeley (1859–1925) lived in the hall for a few months in 1896 before moving to London. Her uncle, Reginald Cholmondeley had owned the house when he was host to the American writer Mark Twain (1835–1910) when he visited in 1873 and 1879.

Seller: Buddenbrooks, Inc., Newburyport, MA, U.S.A.