?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 5,000
Bieston, Roger (fl. circa 1550) The Bayte & Snare of Fortune.
[London: John Wayland, circa 1556.]
First edition, folio, one of two variants printed at the same time; title page within elaborate architectural woodcut device; this issue with "Baite" in the headline on A2 recto; text in black letter throughout; 20 leaves; bound in later limp parchment by Maltby of Oxford; with some straight-through wormholes; 13 1/8 x 8 3/4 in.
"I was lucky enough this morning to meet again with an old friend --a book that I have missed for a good many years: it was one of my earliest purchases of the kind --Roger Beston's Bayte and Snare of Fortune, printed by Wayland before the Reformation. It is a very thin folio, and it had slipped behind some other books. It is a very clever discussion on the value and uses of money, the result being that money is admitted to be superior to everything else: it is a dialogue between Man and Money. Man throughout has the best of the argument, but Money at the close the best of the bargain. This Bieston, or Beeston, was the father or grandfather of the men of the same name, who were connected with our old theatres before and after the time of Shakespeare." (Quoted from John Payne Collier's An Old Man's Diary, London: Thomas Richards, 1872, page 84.)
