Apr 19, 2007 - Sale 2110

Sale 2110 - Lot 87

Price Realized: $ 11,400
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 15,000 - $ 25,000
MORGAN, JOHN PIERPONT. Catalogue of Manuscripts and Early Printed Books from the Libraries of William Morris, Richard Bennett, Bertram Fourth Earl of Ashburnham, and Other Sources, now forming Portion of the Library of J. Pierpont Morgan. Profusion of illustrations, including 50 superb chromolithographed plates, many embossed and partly printed in gold, and one monochrome plate. Half-title and final imprint leaf in each volume. 4 volumes. Folio, 380x292 mm, first volume in red levant gilt, the rest in 1/2 red levant gilt, all by Riviere & Son, slight wear to spine ends and cover corners, minor discoloration at top of Volume 1 front cover, Volume 4 rear joint rubbed in a few places. (EHLS) London: Printed at the Chiswick Press, 1906-07

Additional Details

first edition, limited to 125 copies of the first volume and 175 sets of the rest, of the first catalogue of the Morgan library, "probably the most elaborate ever made of a private collection" (Needham). The manuscripts were described in the first volume by M. R. James, and the xylographica and printed books in the remaining 3 volumes by E. Gordon Duff, Stephen Aldrich, Robert Proctor, and A. W. Pollard, who characterized the collection in his preface as "admirably and concisely representative of fifteenth century typography." Employing Proctor's scheme of type measurement, the Morgan catalogue was in effect a prototype of the British Museum Catalogue of Books printed in the XVth Century, which commenced publication in 1908. De Ricci, English Collectors, page 173; Hobson, Great Libraries, pages 288-91; Kristeller, Latin Manuscript Books, page 164; Needham, William Morris and the Art of the Book, pages 46 and 100. From the library of Charles William Dyson Perrins, with his bookplates, and with an ANS from Pollard ("With A. W. Pollard's kind regards, British Museum, 21.4.1911") tipped in Volume 2.