Herrick, Robert

Estimate

12,000 - 18,000 USD

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Description

Herrick, Robert
Hesperides: or, The Works both Humane & Divine. London: Printed for John Warren and Francis Eglesfield, and are to be sold at the Crown and Marygold in Saint Paul’s Church-yard, 1648
Paper, Ink, Leather

8vo (6 3/4 x 4 3/8 in.; 170 x 110 mm). Engraved frontispiece portrait of Herrick by William Marshall, woodcut device of crown on title-page, with the scarce errata leaf, separate title-page, pagination, and signatures to His Noble Numbers: or, His Pious Pieces, C7, M8, and O8 cancelled; eighteenth-century manuscript notes on page 41, upper margin trimmed, one wormhole in the lower right corner from page 81 to page 348. Contemporary calf; slightly rubbed, bottom of the upper joint fragile.

Provenance

William E. Stockhausen (Sotheby Parke Bernet, 19 November 1974, lot 245). acquisition: Purchased at the foregoing sale through Seven Gables

Literature

Wing H1596, H1597; Church 392; Grolier/English 29; Grolier/Wither to Prior 441; Hayward 95; Pforzheimer 468

Catalogue Note

A very fine copy of the first edition, second issue (with the cancels). The printer of this work is not known, but he is excoriated by Herrick in a quatrain preceding the errata: “For these Transgressions which thou here dost see. | Condemne the Printer, Reader, and not me; | Who gave him forth good Grain, though he mistook | The Seed; so sow’d these Tares throughout my Book.” Indeed, the printer’s errors on three leaves were so numerous that they required cancels, which appear in virtually all copies. Hesperides is seldom found in a contemporary binding.