The Complaint: or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, & Immortality.

£12,000 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Foxon, English Verse 1700-1750 , Y24 (listing 11 copies in 8 libraries); ESTC lists 14 copies in 11 libraries (of which 9 are in 7 libraries in the USA) to which can be added copies at the V A Museum and Princeton; Rothschild Catalogue 2619 (disbound, uncut); Hayward, English Poetry , 165 (Rothschild copy). The advertisements on the front wrapper for “Books Printed for R. Dodsley at Tully’s Head, in Pall-Mall” are headed by Dodsley’s woodcut “Tully’s Head” device and list 34 titles including Dr. Samuel Johnson’s London: A Poem . The survival of this copy in its original printed wrappers is almost certainly unique. David Foxon in the appendix of “Bibliographical Notabilia” to his exhaustive survey of early eighteenth-century poetry lists a copy of the second edition of The Complaint (published two months later in quarto) at Cambridge University Library with advertisements on the wrappers as being the only example of wrappers with printed advertisements among the many thousands of poems that he had seen. The Cambridge copy (ex Lord Acton) is rebound in boards and has the front blue paper wrapper with advertisements for six books preserved at the end. At this time a number of periodicals, e.g. The Gentleman’s Magazine and Dodsley’s own Museum , were published in monthly parts with printed wrappers (usually of the same blue paper) detailing the contents, etc. but Dodsley seems to have been the first to see the opportunity to promote his stock in this way. Dr. Edward Young’s (1683

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