A General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels … Europe.

London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808-1809.

Price: $2,500.00


About the item

Frontispieces, 2 maps (1 folding) & 18 plates. xiv, 852; 834 pp. 6 vols. 4to. Recently bound in half brown calf and marbled boards, spine labels gilt. Ex-library with perforated stamp on title pages & finals pages, some browning of leaves, plates offset. Very good.

Item #39882

Pinkerton's collection of voyages was published over the course of six years in a total of seventeen volumes. The six volumes devoted to Europe comprise the largest section of the collection. They are "of great value for its texts, which are sometimes given entire and sometimes abridged, with as much as possible of the traveler's own language" (Hill).

Pinkerton was something of a character. Having apprenticed to an Edinburgh solicitor, upon the death of his father and receipt of his inheritance, he immediately turned his back to a legal career and dedicated himself to literary matters. Through his works as a historian, poet and playwrite, he made friendships with the likes of Horace Walpole, Walter Scott and Edward Gibbon and through his controversial religious views and short temper he eventually lost them.