(Mennes, John, and James Smith)

8vo (5 1/2 x 3 1/4 in.; 138 x 85 mm). Small woodcut stamp on title-page, woodcut initial, printer's ornaments throughout; lacks initial blank, a few leaves trimmed close, E2 cropped costing most of signature mark and catchword, short tear costing a few letters in running head of E4. Nineteenth-century red morocco by F. Bedford paneled gilt, the spine in six compartments lettered and decorated gilt, gilt dentelles, marbled endpapers, edges gilt.  

Edward Hale Bierstadt (engraved bookplate by E.D. French dated 1894). acquisition: John Fleming

Wing M1710; ESTC R202916; Grolier/Wither to Prior 547; Timothy Raylor, Cavaliers, Clubs, and Literary Culture: Sir John Mennes, James Smith, and the Order of the Fancy (1994), pp. 217–240

8vo (5 1/2 x 3 1/4 in.; 138 x 85 mm) Small woodcut stamp on title-page, woodcut initial, printer's ornaments throughout; lacks initial blank, a few leaves trimmed close, E2 cropped costing most of signature mark and catchword, short tear costing a few letters in running head of E4. Nineteenth-century red morocco by F. Bedford paneled gilt, the spine in six compartments lettered and decorated gilt, gilt dentelles, marbled endpapers, edges gilt.
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First edition, the Bierstadt copy, of this celebrated miscellany, which contains a number of poems by two notable royalists, Mennes and Smith, Their jolly, racy and ribald verses were for some years widely circulated in manuscript  and were very influential on the development of Restoration genres such as burlesque.

Raylor argues that of the forty-five poems, eight can be attributed to Mennes and Smith, and nineteen to others, while the remaining seventeen anonymous poems include a few which might be attributable to them on stylistic grounds.