antiquarian bookseller - Peter Harrington

Peter Harrington Antiquarian Bookseller
80. ROBERTS, David.
The Holy Land. After lithographs
by Louis Haghe. From Original
Drawings … With Historical
Descriptions by the Rev. George
Croly, LL.D.
Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co., London, Paris & New York, [1887] [19093]
£1500
4to, in three parts, with divisional titles in red and black.
Publisher’s blue-green cloth, pictorial front cover in gilt and
dark red, spine lettered gilt and with floral decoration in
dark red, rear cover with floral design blocked in blind, black
endpapers, gilt edges. With 120 plates from drawings by
David Roberts. Cloth cover slightly soiled with bumping to
edges and some rubbing to ends of spine and corners, repair
to front inner hinge, minor occasional foxing otherwise in very
good condition.
A handsome late Victorian reprint of Roberts’s Holy Land,
in three parts: division I, Jerusalem and Galilee; division II,
the Jordan and Bethlehem; division III, Idumea and Petra.
The plates are reproduced from the new edition of 1855
(see previous item), printed with one tint.
81. ROUTLEDGE, William
Scoresby & Katherine.
With a Prehistoric People. The
Akikúyu of British East Africa being
some account of the method of life
and mode of thought found existent
amongst a nation upon its first
contact with European civilisation
… with illustrations and a map.
London, Edward Arnold, 1910 [20599] £600
Large 8vo. Finely bound in green morocco, gilt titles and
decoration to spine, raised bands, gilt rule to boards, marbled
endpapers, top edge gilt, others uncut; original front cloth
cover and spine bound in at the back. Frontispiece, folding
map and 136 plates. Light foxing to uncut edges, otherwise
a fine copy.
FIRST EDITION. Born to a wealthy and prestigious English
Quaker family in 1866, Katherine Maria Pease became
one of the first female graduates of Oxford University.
At the age of forty, she married a charismatic Australian
adventurer, William Scoresby Routledge, and the couple
went to live among the Akikuyu, the subject of this book.
They later made an expedition to Easter Island to excavate
the famous statues. A paranoid schizophrenic, Katherine
was ultimately institutionalized by her husband.
82. SACKVILLE-WEST, Vita.
Twelve Days. An account of a
journey across the Bakhtiari
Mountains in South-western Persia.
The Hogarth Press, London, 1928 [37384] £875
8vo. Original marbled brown and black cloth, titles to spine
gilt. Photographic illustrations. An excellent copy.
FIRST EDITION, Presentation Copy, with the author’s
signed presentation inscription to the front free endpaper,
“Irene [Scott] from Vita”. Scott owned a number of
presentation copies from Vita Sackville-West and so
was presumably close to her, but her identity otherwise
remains elusive.
83. SHOBERL, Frederic [ed.]
The World in Miniature; Persia,
containing a Brief Description of
the Country; and an Account of its
Government, Laws, and Religion,
and of the Character, Manners and
Customs, Arts, Amusements, &c. of
its Inhabitants.
London, R. Ackermann, 1822 [37042] £875
3 volumes, 12mo. 30 hand-coloured plates, plate 30 an
aquatint, 28 and 29 coloured line, the rest stipple engravings.
Endpapers marginally browned through paste-action, offsetting
from the plates as usual, light browning throughout,
but a very good set in contemporary tree sheep, a little rubbed
at the extremities, silk markers.
FIRST EDITION.
Abbey Travel 6.
84. SOPWITH, T.
Catalogue 57: Travel Section 2: Africa and the Middle East to Persia
Notes of a Visit to Egypt, by Paris,
Lyons, Nismes, Marseilles and
Toulon.
London, Printed for Private Circulation, 1857 [40103] £500
8vo. Original dun wavy combed cloth, blind panels to the
boards, title gilt to spine. Frontispiece and 3 other plates after
sketches by the author, illustrations to the text. Just a little
browned, cloth very slightly rubbed, else very good.
FIRST EDITION. Sopwith, surveyor and civil engineer,
undertook surveys for the Newcastle and Carlisle Railway
and the corporation of Newcastle. He was elected to the
Institution of Civil Engineers in 1832, and in the course
of his work “he came to know, and sometimes to work
with, engineers such as George and Robert Stephenson,
Isambard Kingdom Brunel, William Cubitt, and W. G.
Armstrong; and among his friends he included Decimus
Burton, Charles Landseer, Charles Barry, Rowland Hill, and
professors Sedgwick and Faraday” (ODNB). His companions
on this trip were Stephenson and Frederick Richard
Lee, “the well-known artist and Royal Academician.”
Essentially a touristic memoir produced for the interest
of friends, but in view of the participants this account
unsurprisingly has a certain concentration of engineering
matters, particularly of railways and architecture. Chapter
X is dedicated to the Alexandria-Cairo Railway, “The First
Egyptian Railway”, and Stephenson’s work on it, noting the
tubular spans and the swing-bridges at Benha and Birket
al-Saba; there are also insights into the sites at Gizeh,
Memphis and Sakkara, and it is interesting to note that
Lee prepared a number of photographs, “sun pictures”, to
present to Sopwith, Stephenson and “some other friends
… as reminiscences of our pleasant excursion.” We have
been unable to trace surviving examples of these latter
images.