Hawes, Stephen

4to (7 x 5 1/2 ins.; 179 x 140 mm). Black letter, woodcut title border (copied from Troy's Champfleury, Paris), Lombard intitials, 15 (of 16) woodcuts, 107 of 112 leaves, lacking the last five (Cc4, Dd1-4); title soiled with the margins chipped, worming in lower inner margins of final leaves occasionally intruding into catchwords, one lower corner torn away. Contemporary limp vellum with endpapers renewed at an early date. Red morocco, gilt, pull-off case.

Thomas Gray (title-page signature and marginalia) — Frederick Locker Lampson (bookplate) — Charles Walker Andrews (bookplate and acquisition note)  — H. Bradley Martin (bookplate; Sotheby's New York, May 1, 1990, lot 2886). acquisition: Purchased at the foregoing sale through Bernard Quaritch

STC 12951 or 12952; ESTC 112593 or 119776

Thomas Gray's copy, with his notes, of this rare edition.

The woodcuts herein are repeated from Wynkyn de Worde's first two editions of 1509 and 1517, both of which are known only in single copies. The third edition of 1554 doesn't use these cuts, but is similarly impossible to acquire. 

The poet Thomas Gray has recorded on the endleaves what he knows of the book's  bibliographic history, having purchased it, according to his catalogue of his library preserved at the Morgan, for 9s, 6d and recorded it as one of the "Books bought since I came to London, 1760."

There were two issues of this edition, but without the colophon to which issue the present belongs remains a mystery. STC gives nine locations for both issues combined, excluding this copy.