FRENCH LITERATURE.

£750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Fables, lettres, et variétés historiques. Second edition (first published by Elmsly alone in 1771) of this compendium of passages for students of French, here handsomely bound in red morocco, an English binding making considerable effort to match the generally higher standards of contemporary French binders. Peter Elmsly, or Elmsley, was principally involved in importing foreign books and was often described as a French bookseller, although he was born in Aberdeenshire. Elmsley served as bookseller and shipping agent for Edward Gibbon, assisting in the management of his affairs in London when Gibbon was in Lausanne. He was also the first named of the conger of booksellers who conceived and published The Works of the English Poets with Prefaces, Biographical, and Critical, by Samuel Johnson. For this edition he was joined by Edward and Charles Dilly, notorious in many circles for their republican sympathies. They published a further three editions before the end of the century.

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