Lot 105

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

Estimate

3,000 - 5,000 USD

bidding is closed

Description

Shelley, Percy Bysshe
The Revolt of Islam. London: C and J Ollier, 1818.
Paper, ink, leather

8vo (227 x 142 mm). Uncut, erratal leaf at rear; some very minor spotting. Original blue boards backed with marbled paper, paper spine label; joints starting. Half-morocco case.

Provenance

Buxton Forman copy (extensive autograph note on pastedown detailing provenance); Jerome Kern (bookplate).

Literature

Grannis 43,44; Wise, Ashley Library V., p.67; Tinker 1895

Catalogue Note

first edition, second issue, comprised of the sheets of Laon and Cythna, with many leaves cancelled and a new title. maria gisborne's copy, as identified by Buxton Forman who purchased it at a 1878 sale, where books from John Gisborne were sold by Elizabeth Rumble, to whom he had left them.

John and Maria Gisborne were two of Shelley's closest friends in Italy, where the accomplished Maria was a magnet for cultivated English expatriates. She had refused William Godwin before marrying John, a businessman with ''a prodigious nose'' and an undeserved reputation for being ''an excessive bore'' (The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. F.L. Jones, 1964, II, no.511). He often helped Shelley with his domestic and financial problems, and acted as his de facto literary agent when in London.

Maria was the subject of one of Shelley's finest poems, 'Letter to Maria Gisborne," in which he mentions his friend Samuel Coleridge: ''You will see Coleridge -- he who sits obscure / In the exceeding lustre and the pure / Intense irradiation of a mind, / Which, with its own internal lightning blind, / Flags wearily through darkness and despair -- / A cloud-encircled meteor of the air, / A hooded eagle among blinking owls.''

A presentation copy to the Gisbornes of Zapolya was sold in these rooms, Sotheby's New York, 11 December 2003, lot 83