George Gregory

Finely bound set of an early 19th-century copy of A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences.

• Sold as a set of 3.
• George Gregory (English).
• London: Printed for Richard Phillips, 1806–1807.
• [4], 960; vi, [2], 928pp. 
• Folio.
• Vols. I and II text, vol. III 138 full-page engraved plates with MS table of contents in pen.
• Bound in contemporary half-Russia, marbled boards ruled in gilt, gilt spine in compartments.

"The beginning of the nineteenth century brought with it a boom in encyclopedia publishing: the example of the Encylopédie and the Encyclopaedia Britannica had proved that encyclopaedias were needed, and that good profits could be expected from sales to the rapidly increasing middle-class section of the population in Western Europe" (Collinson, p. 174).

Although named as the editor of A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, George Gregory (1754–1808) had little actual involvement in the compilation of the work which was entrusted instead to an anonymous "hack author" (identified by the mathematician Olinthus Gregory as Jeremiah Joyce). Joyce (1763–1816), a Unitarian minister and member of the radical London Corresponding Society, was arrested during the Pitt ministry’s crackdown on Jacobin sympathizers in 1794. He was also responsible for the rival The British Encyclopaedia, published in 1809.