?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
Female Provenance: Frances Wolfreston (1607-1677) Lodowick Carlell (1602?-1675) The Deserving Favorite. As it was lately Acted, first before the Kings Majestie, and since publikely at the Black-Friers.
London: Printed for Mathew Rhodes, 1629.
First edition, quarto, the variant with "Maiesties" not "Maiesies" on the sixth line of the title page; lacking final blank N4, with N3 the cancellans printed as A4; bound in modern half leather with marbled paper board, title slightly dusty; "Frances Wolfreston her book" inscribed at the top of page B1 recto, title inscribed in her hand, "a exeding p[rity] one" identical to an inscription on the title of a 1621 edition of Heywood's A Pleasant Conceited Comedy in the Boston Public Library, additionally signed by Wolfreston's oldest daughter Grace (d. 1720) on N3 verso; this particular title not listed in the 1856 Sotheby's auction catalogue of the Wolfreston books (although some books were sold as group lots, or "parcels"); purchased from Seven Gables by the present owner in 1976 for $1,248; 6 7/8 x 5 in.
STC 4628; Greg II 423 (a); Pforzheimer 131; ESTC S107554; rare at auction.
"Frances Wolfreston was a gentrywoman from the English Midlands whose expansive private library first came to scholarly attention with publications from Johan Gerritsen in 1964 and Paul Morgan in 1989. A large portion of her library was dispersed at auction by Sotheby's in 1856, with some books going directly to institutions like the British Library and others to the libraries of prominent male collectors of the 19th century. Most ultimately ended up in libraries concentrated in the United Kingdom and the United States. Morgan identified 103 books from Wolfreston's library in an appendix to his essay Frances Wolfreston and ‘Hor Bouks‘: A Seventeenth-Century Woman Book Collector." (Quoted from: https://franceswolfrestonhorbouks.com/) We are happy to see Carlell's Deserving Favorite added to the list of books from Wolfreston's dispersed collection, and to aid Sarah Lindenbaum in her efforts to virtually reassemble this lost library.
