BRETON, Nicholas.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Wits Private Wealth. Stored with choise commodities to content the minde. An extremely rare publication by Nicholas Breton (Britton), a prolific writer in both prose and verse. Among his prodigious output were "light but entertaining miscellanies of popular aphorisms, social observations, and pithy nuggets of popular wisdom" such as the present work, which was one of his most successful publications. In his preface, Breton explains that he has set down a sentence for every day of the year, and that "some of them were written by wiser men than my selfe".The title was entered in the Stationers' Register on 16 January 1606. Dedicated to Sir John Crooke of Buckinghamshire, it went through 12 editions between the first of 1607 and 1670, but the ephemeral nature of such publications means that very few copies of any edition survive. ESTC locates one copy of the first and only two copies of the 1612 edition, which was until 1932 thought to be the earliest surviving edition. Only two copies of this title appear in auction records: a copy of the 1642 edition, sold at Sotheby's in 1946, and the hitherto unrecorded 1611 edition, from the library of Sir Walter Halsey, Bart, which brought £60 in 1932. A copy of Breton's 1597 work Wits Trenchmour, formerly in the library of the Earls of Macclesfield, brought $22,500 in the Pirie sale, Sotheby's New York, 2015.This copy has the collector's bookplate of Thomas Gaisford (1816-1898), eldest son of the noted book collector and Roxburghe Club me

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