[Brome, Alexander, editor]

8vo (6 1/8 x 4 in.; 155 x 101 mm). Typographic ornament on title-page, typographic headpieces, woodcut initial; lacking blanks A1 and G6, lower fore-edge corner of C3 restored, cut close at top, shaving headlines on A3v and 34r and a number of page numbers. Nineteenth-century straight-grain blue morocco gilt, slate-coated endpapers, gilt edges.

J. Fletcher (contemporary signature on title-page) — William Holgate (armorial bookplate). acquisition:Bernard Quaritch, 1991

 

Wing R307; ESTC R203305; Case, Poetical Miscellanies 128; Thomason Tracts E.1761[2G]

8vo (6 1/8 x 4 in.; 155 x 101 mm). Typographic ornament on title-page, typographic headpieces, woodcut initial; lacking blanks A1 and G6, lower fore-edge corner of C3 restored, cut close at top, shaving headlines on A3v and 34r and a number of page numbers. Nineteenth-century straight-grain blue morocco gilt, slate-coated endpapers, gilt edges.
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First, or first surviving, edition of an intriguing and idiosyncratic collection of Royalist rhymes and satires. "The importance of Ratts Rhimed to Death actually derives from a number of unique features of the collection: is, for example, the first miscellany in English to be consciously devoted to street ballads, while the uniformly topical and political nature of the satires of which it is comprised marks it as the first true collection of what was shortly to become an immensely popular form of miscellany, the anthologized 'poems on affairs of state'" (Mark McDayter, Rump: Or An Exact Collection: An Electronic Edition, 2004). 

The prefatory "To the Reader" implies that this is a second edition, but it also refers to the component ballads being "formerly Printed in loose sheets," so some portion of the contents may simply have earlier appeared as handbills. In either case, no earlier book edition is extant. The editor subsequently issued greatly expanded editions in 1660 and 1662 (see following lot).

Rare: apart from the Macclesfield copy, this appears to be the only copy offered at auction since the Thorn-Drury sale in 1931.