Books

London: John Murray, 1862.. 8 vols. 8vo. (21.5 x 13.5 cm). Contemporary half chocolate brown calf over marbled boards, spines with raised bands and gilt-decorated compartments, marbled endpapers and edges. Engraved portrait frontispiece, 17 engraved maps throughout of which 14 folding, and 8 partially coloured by a contemporary hand. Ex libris Richard Combe Miller with his engraved armorial bookplate ("Dieu et mes amis") to front pastedown in each volume. Light scuffing and shelfwear, minor small splits at bottom of joints of volumes 1, 2 and 4 (but all joints still strong and not cracked), contents clean and crisp, generally a very good set in a handsome contemporary binding. "It is still entitled to be esteemed as the greatest historical work ever written" (Adams, Manual of Historical Literature, 146-7). This edition with notes by Henry Hart Milman, historian and Dean of St Paul's, regarded as the "best British nineteenth-century editor of Gibbon" (ODNB).

Published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788, this extensive work by Edward Gibbon provides a detailed history of the decline of the Roman Empire.