Books

A beautifully bound set of an attractive edition, printed in a large legible type. Arthur Murphy's "Essay on the Life and Genius of Samuel Johnson" was first published in 1792. The set has a Scottish provenance, with the ownership inscription at the head of the title pages of "Mrs Forbes, Echt House", Aberdeenshire. This was the home of James Forbes (1775-1850), who married in 1801 Jane Niven (1795-1842); thence by descent to Anthony Keith-Falconer, 7th earl of Kintore (1794-1844), with his small embossed stamp on blanks before each title, a fox head over a scroll bearing the motto "Floreat Scientia" (let knowledge flourish). Kintore was a keen and notoriously reckless huntsman. "At his hunting box in Scotland, which he called "The Peat Stack,"on all the china, glass, and plate, was a fox's head engraved, with the motto 'Floreat Scientia,' and he had the same device on his travelling carriage" (Loder-Symonds, A History of the Old Berkshire Hunt from 1760 to 1904, 2013). That doyen of 19th-century sporting writers, Charles James Apperley ("Nimrod"), described him memorably: "He is as hard as flint. A muddy ditch is a bed of roses to Lord Kintore" (Hunting Reminiscences, 1843, p. 214). Twelve vols, octavo (210 x 131 mm). Finely bound in contemporary blue-green straight-grain morocco, spines with four low raised bands tooled in black with a Greek key roll, gilt lettered direct and richly tooled, sides with thick-and-thin gilt rule border enclosing a panel of interlocking circles-and-rosettes and a blind foliate border, pretty gilt edge roll and turn-ins, drab brown surface-paper endpapers. Fine stipple-engraved portrait frontispiece of Johnson by Samuel Freeman after Francesco Bartolozzi set within an octagonal border. Pretty late 19th-century bookplates of E. and J. Dupléssis Beylard, engraved by Henri Bouvier of Paris. Slight rubbing, a very handsome set.