Donne, John.

4to (183 x 140 mm.), first edition of the author's collected poems, three woodcut initial capitals, late nineteenth-century maroon straight-grained morocco by Stikeman and Co. of New York with triple fillet gilt border and gilt frame with daisy cornerpieces, spine in six compartments, two with gilt lettering and five with elaborate gilt decoration, inside dentelles, edges gilt, in a red folding box and slipcase, modern front free endpaper attached with adhesive tape, upper corner of preliminary blank [A]1 renewed, slight wear at joints and edges

Beverley Chew (1850-1924), bookplate; John L. Clawson (1865-1933), bookplate; Helen Boyd Dull, bookplate; John Gribbel of St Austell Hall, bookplate on rear paste-down endpaper; Doris Louise Benz, bookplate, sale of books and manuscripts from her library, Christie's New York, 16 November 1984, lot 98; "Property of a Gentleman", sold Christie's New York, 3 December 2007, lot 455

Pforzheimer 296; Keynes Donne 78; STC 7045

Condition is described in the main body of the cataloguing, where appropriate.
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An exceptional copy with wide margins, with a distinguished provenance. "The Printer to the Understanders" leaf (2A1-2) is here, as often, bound directly after the title (between [A]2 and A3), and Nn1r has thirty-five lines of text and omits the running title. This copy bears an early bookseller's price on the preliminary blank ("pretium 3^s"), while a quotation from Robert Wolseley's 1685 "Preface to Valentinian" in a late-seventeenth-century hand on the final blank ("Verses have feet given em, either to walk, gracefull & smoth, & sometimes with Majesty & state, like Virgil's, or to run light & easie, like Ovid's, not to stand stock-still like Dr Donne's, or to hoble like indigested prose") reveals the changing critical mood that led to Donne's long neglect, until his rediscovery at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Although Donne's works had circulated widely in scribal form, this first printed edition of his poems was crucial in bringing Donne's poems to a wider readership. Henry King, poet and Bishop of Chichester, is believed to have assisted John Mariot in bringing the book into print, and he also supplied one of the elegies. The poet's son, John Donne Jr, was not involved in the publication and in 1637 he successfully petitioned the Archbishop of Canterbury for control of the poems, claiming that this edition had appeared "without anie leave or autoritie".