GILBERT, W. S.

£285 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Bab Ballads. Collected edition of the author's highly popular and comedically self-illustrated light verses, presented here with a lovely example of an onlay by the Spottiswoode bindery. The Bab Ballads, named after Gilbert's childhood nickname, "laid the foundation of his fame on the stage and... became the source of some of his operatic plots" in Gilbert & Sullivan productions (Drabble, p. 391).In these poems, Gilbert "showed his ingenious metrical skill and sketched out his fantasy world, turning the odd into the ordinary, calling it 'Topsy-Turvydom'. The ballads became the favourite literature of sailors, soldiers, lawyers, doctors" (ibid.) The first book of Bab Ballads was published in 1868; this collected edition, first published in 1898, gathers Gilbert's Bab corpus into one volume.

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