(Poets of Great Britain) | A handsome travel library

(Poets of Great Britain)

The Poets of Great Britain Complete from Chaucer to Churchill (ed. John Bell). Edinburg[h]: Apollo Press, 1780–84

109 volumes, 12mo (128 x 77 mm). Additional engraved titles, engraved portraits. Uniform contemporary polished calf, smooth spines gilt in compartments with lyre-tools and two red (author, full vol. number) and one green (author vol. number) morocco labels, plain endpapers, yellow edges, three vols. non-uniform (49, Prior 3; 52, Swift 1; 77, Pope 2) but in highly sympathetic contemporary calf with spines gilt with a single red morocco label; occasional very light rubbing to extremities, but the set seemingly rarely consulted. The volumes housed in two contemporary calf book-form boxes with marbled paper edges, in imitation of a dos-a-dos binding (ca. 445 x 317 x 108 mm), publisher's advertising handbills for this set and for Bell's British Theatre, mounted on the inside lids of the cases; rather worn.

A rare survival of a set of Bell's Poets of Great Britain in its two original traveling library cases. In the handbill for this series, Bell announces that he "Has the peculiar satisfaction of informing the Public, that his edition of the Poets of Great-Britain may now be had complete: the scarce volumes have been reprinted, and the embellishments restored to their original beauty; [the set can be] fitted up in two cases, constructed in the shape and appearance of two folio volumes, adapted for travelling, in the seat of a post-chaise, or for cabinet furniture. … In all one hundred and nine volumes, including fifity authors, being every English Classic published within a serries of four hundred years."