SCOTT, Sir Walter.

£5,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Waverley; or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since. First edition of Scott's first novel, bound by a royally appointed Edinburgh bindery with an autograph letter signed by Scott and related ephemera. The volumes bear the bookplates of the Glaswegian collector of Scottish literature Andrew J. Kirkpatrick (1839-1900).The tersely penned letter, mounted on a blank in the first volume, reads in full: "Sir, I am sorry you should have relied much on my interest which is really of a very limited kind. I have no access to those who naturally fall to have the disposal of military situations and should not like to seek it for the purpose of asking favours which would certainly be refused. I am sir, your humble servant, Walter Scott. Edin. Sunday. Oct. 1829. I mentioned that I would be glad to be of some use to you but the opportunity of being so is likely to be rare."A slip of paper bearing the name "Mr McShin," likely that of the recipient and written in Scott's hand, is mounted on the page following the letter. Tipped in at the rear of the volume is a playbill for The Vision of the Bard, a masque performed at Covent Garden in 1832 in honour of Scott's death. Mounted on the facing page is the front panel of an envelope addressed by the masque's author, James Sheridan Knowles (1784-1862), to the actor and academic Frederick Baltimore Calvert (1793-1877), who moved to Aberdeen in 1829.

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