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Summary
Author: (Hulbert, C., ed.)
Title: The parlour book of British scenery, architecture and antiquities ; being a series of select descriptions of towns, villages, public buildings, gentlemens' seats, castles, colleges, churches, ruins, & & in Great Britain, with appropriate engravings by Barret, Sparrow, Rowle, Shepherd, & from drawings by Wyatt, Nixon, Thornton, Hornsey, Toussaint, &&&. (First Series)/Second Series.
Publication: Shrewsbury, "printed and published by C.Hulbert" 1827, 1828.
Price: £850
Reference: 11327
Full Description
4to. 2 vols. (44)pp, 30 engraved plates ; (52)pp (two early leaves slightly creased), 30 engraved plates. Original boards, with printed paper labels on upper covers, rebacked with matching cloth spines. Some minor spotting or offsetting but generally in good, fresh condition. No ownership inscriptions but Sir Howard Colvin's copies.
Two unfamiliar volumes of engraved views of buildings and townscapes, issued by an enterprising bookseller and publisher in Shrewsbury who reused for the purpose engravings previously published in the European Magazine (from which the majority of the plates derive), the Beauties of England and Wales and the Ambulator. The advantage is that they bring together in a handsome, reader-friendly format illustrations and descriptions of buildings which could otherwise only be found in a laborious search through earlier publications, and the buildings concerned include a number of which illustrations are not obviously available elsewhere, for example, the Amicable Assurance Company's building in Fleet Street, London (designed, as Colvin records, by the rather pleasingly named London district surveyor, Ezekiel Delight) ; Sir William Curtis's house at Culland's Grove, Southgate, Middlesex ; Grocer's Hall, London, as designed by William Leverton before alterations carried out in the 1830s by Joseph Gwilt ; and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, as originally designed by James Wyatt.