[Mascall, Leonard]

Estimate

2,000 - 3,000 USD

bidding is closed

Description

A Booke of Engines and Traps to Take Polcats, Buzardes, Rattes, Mice and All Other Kindes of Vermine and Beasts Whatsoever, Most Profitable for All Warriners, and Such as Delight in This Kinde of Sport and Pastime. London: Printed by John Wolfe, and are to be sold by Edward White, 1590
paper, ink, leather

Part 2 of 2 only, 4to (7 x 5 in.; 178 x 127 mm). Separate title-page for part 2 beginning on G2 with continuous registration and pagination, 35 woodcut illustrations and diagrams, folding woodcut plate signed "L4" and numbered "87," text chiefly in black letter; bound without all of part 1 and leaf G1, a few running heads shaved. Nineteenth-century half red roan over marbled boards; very worn.

Provenance

Thomas Blyth (engraved armorial bookplate with motto "Suaviter in modo fortiter in re"—i.e., "gentle in manner, firm in action")

Literature

STC 17572; ESTC S120078; Litchfield 1; Schwerdt 2:17

Catalogue Note

First edition of the second half of Mascall's treatise bearing the general title A Booke of Fishing with Hooke & Line, and of All Other Instruments Thereunto Belonging. While his fishing text is freely adapted from Dame Juliana Berners' Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle (1496), his discourse on hunting and trapping is largely original, and, in Schwerdt's opinion, "the earliest special treatise of its kind." A rare imprint, this marks its first appearance as a single work in decades. The only complete copy of the work sold at auction was the Litchfield copy (Sotheby's New York, 29 November 2001, lot 86).