George Shaw | Museum Leverianum, containing select specimens from the museum of the late Sir Ashton Lever, 1792

George Shaw

Museum Leverianum, containing select specimens from the museum of the late Sir Ashton Lever. [London]: James Parkinson, 1792

FIRST EDITION, 2 parts in one volume, 4to (275 x 210mm.), titles, dedications, and text in Latin and English, 72 hand-coloured engraved plates after Sarah Stone, Philip Reinagle, Charles Reuben Ryley, Sydenham Edwards and others, contemporary red morocco, some paper toning, binding rebacked to style

RARE. A record of one of the most comprehensive natural history collections of eighteenth-century England, including several fine plates after Philip Reinagle, famed for his contribution to Thornton's Temple of Flora.

Sir Ashton Lever's collecting began with live birds but expanded into all fields of natural history and many of ethnology. He opened his collection to the public in 1774, having moved it from his home in Alkrington Hall, Lancashire, to Leicester House, London (site of modern-day Leicester Square). However, by 1783 his expenses in maintaining it rose so high that he attempted to sell it to the British Museum, whose trustees, however, declined the offer. Lever was forced to sell the collection by lottery, with tickets at a guinea a piece. The winner was James Parkinson, publisher of the present work.

Parkinson dispersed the collection at auction in 1806.

LITERATURE:

Fine Bird Books, p. 108; Nissen ZBI 3835; Wood, p. 566