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The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; With Critical Observations on their Work. With an Introduction and Notes by Roger Lonsdale

The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; With Critical Observations on their Work. With an Introduction and Notes by Roger Lonsdale

JOHNSON, SAMUEL Four vols, 8vo, original black cloth, gilt lettering. Frontis portrait. The definitive edition of Johnson's famous Lives of the English Poets, issued 225 years after its original publication. This edition, edited by 18th century English literature scholar Roger Lonsdale, has been celebrated as a great achievement in textual scholarship in giving Johnson's 52 biographies literary and historical context unlike anything that been previously accomplished. "The crowning achievement of Lonsdale's career is his magisterial edition of Johnson's Live of the Poets, a work more than two decades in the making. . . . This richly illuminating guide to Samuel Johnson's culminating critical accomplishment also delivers an astonishingly comprehensive masterclass in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poetry, from the shifting status of writing for publication to the increasingly expanding market. Lonsdale's sympathetic understanding of Johnson [is] . . . a rare work whose greatness stands with Johnson's own" - Michael F. Suarez, S.J., in his introduction to Christopher Edwards Antiquarian Books List 87, The Library of Roger Lonsdale. Ink ownership signature with a few notes in pencil on the rear endpapers and margins of another Johnson scholar, Chester Chapin, dated June 14, 2006. This edition is inexplicably out of print - in any format: hard cover, paperback, e-book or print on demand - and accordingly scarce. Strange and shocking that Clarendon Press, a branch of Oxford University Press, would allow an important text like this to be unavailable except at select libraries. Fine copy, enclosed in the publisher's slipcase.
  • $500
Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France

Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany

PIOZZI, HESTER LYNCH [THRALE] 2 vols, 8vo, contemporary red half calf, blue paper boards, marbled endpapers, green leather spine labels, gilt rules and lettering. Six pages of publisher's advertisements in volume two. In 1784 Hester Lynch Thrale (1741-1821), the famous friend and confidante of Samuel Johnson, married an Italian musician, Gabriel Mario Piozzi, and they soon set off for Europe, where they traveled for three years, which she artfully chronicled in one of the most entertaining accounts of the Grand Tour. Written in an informal conversational style, Observations and Reflections is "alive with present-tense immediacy, to erode the barriers between diary and travel narrative. Her delight in Piozzi and in Italy was everywhere apparent in the materials she included in this development of the genre, which subverted masculine tropes of the grand tourist as disillusioned and hard to please" - ODNB. Piozzi's work became a model for other women travel writers and a source for authors like Ann Radcliffe in her novel The Mysteries of Udolpho. Bookplate of Charles Langton Massingberd on the front paste-downs, below which is the bookplate of American author Larry McMurtry. This is a duplicate from his collection of books by women travelers. Edges and boards a little rubbed and worn; light foxing to the prelims; very good copy. ESTC T71718; Rothschild 1551; Pine-Coffin 784-5; Robinson, Wayward Women, page 243
  • $500