Italian tales. Tales of Humour, Gallantry, and Romance, selected and translated from the Italian
PROOFS ON INDIA PAPER
FROM THE COLLECTION OF
CRUIKSHANK’S COLLABORATOR POCOCK
London: Charles Baldwyn, 1824. Proof plates for the first edition, first issue.
Octavo (leaves: 7 3/8” x 4 ½”, 188mm x 114mm; inner mounts: 8 15/16” x 6”, 228mm x 153mm; outer mounts: 15” x 11”, 380mm x 280mm): letterpress title-leaf on laid paper and 16 wood-engraved illustrations with letterpress captions and page-numbers on India paper.
Loose mounts, presented in a green cloth box with the author and title (“CRUIKSHANK/[short rule]/ITALIAN TALES/[short rule]/PROOF PLATES”) gilt to the front board.
Chips, creases, tanning and staining to the mounts, and discoloration from the adhesive. The leaves themselves with some soiling and peripheral tanning and chips. Three plates (to pp. 12, 14, and 238) with damp along one edge, not affecting the text. Graphite manuscript to the verso of the outer mount of the title-leaf: “Pococks sale/ the set on India/ uncut” with other graphite booksellers’ notations to the recto. The cloth box worn and weak, with old repairs.
George Cruikshank (1792–1878) has been called “the greatest of English illustrators,” though Gordon Ray hedges that “not everyone will accept this judgment, but no one will deny his inexhaustible fancy, his skill in dramatic composition, his mastery as an etcher, or the amazing fertility that enabled him to leave behind so vast a body of idiosyncratic and vital work” (The illustrator and the book in England, p. 69). He was the inheritor of the tradition of Hogarth as a social commentator as well as a book-illustrator, perhaps most famously for Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist.
From Cruikshank’s first book illustrations in 1823, the publishing industry in Britain was lurching toward vast print-runs. Dickens (and Darwin and Thackeray and et al.) exploded the demand for books in the first half of the XIXc, and their illustrations provided for the first time a universal visual record of fictional characters’ appearances. Consequently, proof plates became increasingly important to the economics of the book trade. The Italian Tales — without a stated author, although the National Union Catalogue ascribes it to Thomas Roscoe — is primarly sought for its presentation in English of some of the source-material for Shakespeare’s plays, including The Merchant of Venice.
The present suite of proofs is for the first issue of the work, distinguished by the title-page without an illustration (added in the second issue) and the inclusion of the illustration of “The Dead Rider” on p. 58, which was supressed in the second issue. Suites of proofs have long been a bibliographic prize, as they are both early impressions of plates (or, as here, woodblocks) as well as closely associated with the illustrator, author, publisher or some combination. The suite of proofs — even the work itself — is absent from Ray’s authoritative The illustrator and the book in England from 1790 to 1914 (New York: The Pierpont Morgan Library and Oxford University Press, 1976).
The graphite notation to the verso of the mount for the title-leaf indicates that this suite was in the sale of Crawford J. Pocock (Sotheby’s 19-20 June 1890), who was a close friend and collaborator of Cruikshank’s.[1] Lot 405 in the second day of that sale is indeed the “set of 16 woodcuts, proofs on india paper.” Perhaps the mounts were put on by the purchaser at the sale?
Cohn, Catalogue raisonné 444 & Bibliographic catalogue 430.
[1] My thanks to Mr. Scott Ellwood at the Grolier Club, who granted access to their auction and bibliographic catalogues.
Item #JLR0792
Price: $3,250