Bowes Cambridge Binders (1 results)

FIRST EDITION, IN SIGNED BINDING BY MACMILLAN & BOWES, CAMBRIDGE. 8vo, pp. vi, [vi], 348, incl. facsimile from 1837 notebook, two b/w illustrations + b/w photogravure frontis portrait of Darwin, after Julia Margaret Cameron's 1868 photograph. Signed binding by Macmillan & Bowes, Cambridge: full olive calf, five raised band, gilt-stamped lettering and simple floriate decorations to spine, understated art nouveau style decoration to boards, featuring single blind rules with circular flourishes at corners, framing single repeat gilt-stamped floriate decorations. Gilt roll-tooled dots to edges, repeated in double blind to turn-ins. Marbled edges and endpapers. Spine sunned, joints, and extremities rubbed, a little scoring. Gently toned, offsetting from frontis portrait, a few marks, else, pleasingly, clean, tight and bright. Very good A rather handsome copy of the 1892 abridged edition of the posthumous epistolary autobiography of Charles Darwin, edited by his son, Francis, and bound by a contemporary Cambridge institution (which didn't quite overlap with Darwin himself, who had died in 1882), the bookshop, publisher and stationer's Macmillan and Bowes of Cambridge; Darwin had studied at Christ's College, Cambridge (a period covered in this volume) and returned to the city in 1836 following his almost five-year voyage on HMS Beagle. Macmillan and Bowes of Cambridge (1882-1907) was situated on Trinity Street and run by talented bookseller and ABA President-to-be, Robert Bowes (1835-1919), nephew of Daniel and Alexander Macmillan. Five years after his father's death, Francis Darwin had edited The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, including an Autobiographical Chapter (1887; three vols.), then, five years after that, he edited this one-volume abridged edition, which contains "some matter not in F1452 [the unabridged edition]". Freeman 1461.…