The Poetical Works of.
[Glasgow]: Privately Printed [for the Hunterian Club, 1875].
Price: $7,500.00
About the item
One of two copies printed on vellum (edition of 210). Engraved portrait frontispiece, engraving featuring the author in a Jacobean courtier's ruff, two armorial illustrations (one hand colored), and two facsimile title pages; numerous head or tail pieces and devices. [68], 250 pp. 4to. Contemporary burgundy crushed morocco, a.e.g. Faintest traces of shelfwear. Fine. Neat bibliographical note to flyleaf, “One of two copies printed on vellum. Privately printed for the Hunterian Club”. With the etched bookplate of Arthur Kay (by his future wife, Katherine Cameron) above an earlier unidentified bookplate featuring a coronet. Provenance: With the exquisite Katherine Cameron bookplate of Glaswegian collector and businessman Arthur Kay (1862-1939); possibly, given the matching description of the binding, the same copy as previously in the library of James Mann, Esq., of Castlecraig, Peeblesshire.
Item #377911
Choice example, finely bound and one of apparently just two copies printed entirely on vellum, of the Hunterian Club edition of the works of the Scottish poet and courtier Patrick Hannay (fl. 1616-30), essentially reprinting his incredibly rare collected works: The Nightingale, Sheretine and Mariana, A Happy Husband, Elegies on the Death of Queene Anne; Songs and Sonnets (London, 1622).
This edition was produced by Scottish antiquary, librarian of the Signet Library, and sometime secretary of the Bannatyne Club David Laing (1793-1878), who also provided an extensive memoi' of the author. Admitting that “of Hannay's personal history we have very scanty information’, Laing characteristically weaves — from Chancery sources and the internal evidence of Hannay’s published works, including their dedicatory verses — an extensive bio-bibliographical account that includes the author's connections to the court of Queen Anne (1574-1619), and his involvement in Colonel Sir Andrew Gray's regiment, serving under Frederick V, Elector Palatinate of Bohemia at the outset of the Thirty Years War. Whilst some 210 copies of the work were printed for the members of the Glasgow-based Hunterian Club, the late Victorian Scottish text society specialising in the reprinting of notoriously rare and unusual literature — which operated between 1871 and 1902 — it would appear as few as two were printed on vellum.
Given the apparent rarity of any Hunterian Club publication printing on vellum (aside from this volume, in OCLC we could only locate a copy of the same club's edition of Ane new zeir gift : to the Quene Mary, quhen sche come furst hame (Glasgow, ca. 1873-4, at the Morgan), this does not seem unrealistic.
