Prefaces By Leigh Hunt: Mainly to His Periodicals (Limited Edition)

Edited by R. Brimley Johnson

Published by Frank Hollings At The Sign Of Rare Ben Jonson, Great Turnstile, Lincoln's Inn Fields, London, 1927

About this Item

Limited Edition ( 'Five Hundred copies printed for America and England' ). This wasn't the only reason I originally bought the book some years ago. I also bought it because it had a small ex libris label off the bottom edge of the blank verso of the marbled front end paper. The presence of such a label would usually be dissuasive not persuasive, but this one had the name of a Payson G. Gates who it turns out had written a book titled William Hazlitt and (did you guess it) Leigh Hunt: The Continuing Dialogue. The editor of this book, R. Brimley Johnson, also authored a biography of Leigh Hunt titled Leigh Hunt: a Critical Biography. He also edited a book titled Poems by Leigh Hunt and another titled Essays by Leigh Hunt. Happily, Mr. Gates, took very good care of the book. You can see the red covers in the photos. They are perfectly clean. The gilt lettering on the front and on the spine is very bright. The edges and corners and spine ends are all in very good shape. The top page edge is gilt. It is nicely shiny and clean. The middle and bottom page edges are deckled or rough-cut. They did a very solid job. The book is square. The spine is straight. The binding is very solid from cover to cover. The pages are a little on the thick side, good paper, so they have a little bit of a stiff feeling, but there are no cracks or spaces between any of the facing pages or between the covers and any of the pages. It is a solidly bound book. If there is one imperfection with regard to the covers it is that they both bow out a little bit. The inside covers and end papers are a marbled tan, brown and white (with a few dabs of green), a quite unusual coloring, very clean, free of wear. The pages are very clean. There is no foxing or spotting on any of the end papers. There are two small amber spots at the margin of the title page and just across it on the blank verso of the half-title page. They are not terribly conspicuous. I went ahead and turned over all the pages in the book and found about a dozen in total of these small blending amber spots, which is not very much at all. I would characterize the pages as very clean. I did not see any creasing. There are no markings. No attachments other than the aforementioned label. And no one has written anything anywhere in the book. Mr. Gates did his best to save the jacket. It was likely in some disrepair when he purchased the book. He did place it in a fitted protective cover (I know it's not mine because it isn't the brand name I use). Looking at it from the inside I can see that about 80% of the front cover is detached from the front flap and that the rear cover is fully detached from the rear flap (he placed some tape on the inside of the jacket between the two to keep them together and he did some of the same with the spine which is also detached from the front and rear). You can see that there are losses off the bottom and top edges of the spine, that letters are missing from the publisher's name off the bottom edge. There are also small losses at the corners of the middle edges between the front cover and front flap, larger ones at the corners of the middle edges between the rear cover and rear flap. The jacket looks pretty clean, a couple of small spots. The flaps are actually in quite good shape. They don't have any print or anything else on them. I'll rate the jacket Poor because of the detachments and losses, but would note that it doesn't present too badly from the front or rear, and that is not too common to find a dust jacket on a book published in 1927. Seller Inventory # 004052

Bibliographic Details

Title: Prefaces By Leigh Hunt: Mainly to His ...

Publisher: Frank Hollings At The Sign Of Rare Ben Jonson, Great Turnstile, Lincoln's Inn Fields, London

Publication Date: 1927

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Very Good

Dust Jacket Condition: Poor

Edition: Limited Edition