Trollope, Anthony & Trollope, Henry. AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. William Blackwood & Sons, 1883.

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Description: AUTOBIOGRAPHY, William Blackwood & Sons, 1883, first edition? (half title pages and title pages excised), two volumes bound as one, leather label on spine a bit chipped, blank page before preface with 2 pasted in newspaper clippings bearing anecdotes of Trollope, else a tight vg+ copy bound in a Birdsall & Son binding of half vellum and marbled boards with all edges in gold-gilt. A most curious copy as the first available blank page has a 110 word holographic note in an unknown hand (see below) revealing the origin of the sir name Trollope by quoting page 234 from MEMOIRS OF AN EX-MINISTER by the Earl of Malmesbury; Anthony Trollope's armorial bookplate on the f.p.d. and a 30 word holographic note on Harding Petersfield stationery dated in 1882 SIGNED by Anthony Trollope pasted to the verso of the front end-paper. Purchased from the library of the former premier Walt Whitman collector, bibliophile and philanthropist, Charles Feinberg. Before that, apparently once owned by Charles Whibley with his printed label on the f.p.d., he also amassing a large book collection. "Erudite and pugnacious, Charles Whibley was a formidable personality of the British publishing scene between 1890 and 1930. He was an editor, journalist, literary critic, essayist & polemicist whose works included literary and political biographies, reissues of Elizabethan and Jacobean translations of classical authors, personal memoirs, etc. He worked at the Pall Mall Gazette, Macmillan's Magazine and the New Review. " - The Literary Encyclopedia. Perhaps the quotation of Earl of Malmesbury above is in his hand. To continue the curiousity of this volume, on the upper left corner of Trollope's own bookplate, there are the inked initials of RB. If this does indeed indicate that it came from the library of Trollope's good friend and literary associate, Robert Bell (1800-1867); prominent English journalist, miscellaneous writer and editor of the Annontated Edition of the British Poets (24 vols., 1854-1857) as some might suggest (for Trollope purchased Bell's library as an act of charity from his widow soon after Bell died), it does not explain how a book published in 1883 could have been in Bell's library 16 years after his demise.

Seller: THE FINE BOOKS COMPANY / A.B.A.A / 1979, ROCHESTER, MI, U.S.A.