Cut-and-Paste Terence
TERENCE Publii Terentii Afri comoediae. Birmingham: John Baskerville. 1772.
4to. Nineteenth-century calf, central octagonal panel tooled in blind to a diapered design, borders roll-tooled in blind and ruled in gilt, plum morocco lettering-piece to spine, spine decorated in gilt and black, edges gilt, later marbled endpapers; pp. [ii], 364; pp. 203 and 299 misnumbered; this copy with 44 copper engravings by Picart mounted to interleaved blanks (see below); ruled in red throughout, typographic ornaments to title; rebacked and recornered in nineteenth-century brown morocco; sporadic light foxing (heavier to first quire), small marginal loss to head of last leaf not touching text; else a very good copy; nineteenth-century inscription ‘Acheson | Coll: Perf. Harrow’ to first plate verso, Beaufoy Library bookplate to front pastedown, armorial bookplate of Boies Penrose II to front free endpaper, 1920s catalogue cutting pasted to front free endpaper (price cancelled in ink).
Baskerville’s handsome quarto edition of Terence’s comedies, our copy extra-illustrated by Archibald Acheson, 3rd Earl of Gosford (1806–1864) using handsome engravings by Picart cut from a copy of the 1717 Rotterdam-printed French edition of Terence.
Baskerville also published Terence’s Comoediae in octavo in the same year. Gosford’s interest in books began at the age of nine, and the family library in County Armagh, Northern Ireland (for which he was later MP) ‘became a refuge when Gosford was thirteen and his father, a politician embroiled in battles between Catholics and Protestants and mistrusted by both, sought legitimacy and status through an audacious project: replacing the family home with a 242-room Norman Revival Castle’ (Davies). This copy of Terence’s comedies was evidently acquired by Gosford at an early age, bearing his collation note from Harrow; he subsequently matriculated at Christ Church Oxford in 1825, graduating B.A. in 1828.
The significant library he later built, with the help of his friend, the bibliographer Beriah Botfield, included a Gutenberg Bible (later acquired by Estelle Doheny), a First Folio, and a substantial collection of Aldines; it was sold after his death at the age of fifty-seven (from an ‘attack of gout in the head’) to cover his son’s gambling debts, passing en bloc by private contract to the bookseller James Toovey in 1878.
The library was dispersed in several parts, with numerous books held back from auction at every stage: the first portion of the library was sold in Paris in 1882, with a subsequent sale by Puttick & Simpson in April 1884. After Toovey’s death, his son, Charles James Toovey, ‘retained the choicer portion of the library, including the whole of the Aldines and a number of books in beautiful bindings. This collection he sold in 1899 to the late Mr J. Pierpont Morgan and it may be considered one of the notable sections of the latter’s great library’ (De Ricci, p. 157)
Our large-paper quarto copy of Baskerville’s Terence has been extra-illustrated with engravings by Picart cut from the 1717 octavo edition. Curiously, this points to a seemingly unstudied wider practice of Grangerising within Gosford’s library. Each engraving by Picart has been mounted to a blank leaf facing the corresponding text in the Baskerville edition. Gosford’s copy of the 1711–16 Rigaud edition of Homer was seemingly extra-illustrated according to the same method, ‘with Picart’s plates for the Iliad inserted’, taken from the 1731 Amsterdam edition of Les Oeuvres d’Homère translated by Anne Dacier (Lewine, p. 244). He applied the same practice to his copy of the 1749 edition of Henault’s Nouvel abrégé chronologique de l’histoire de France: ‘The Gosford copy of the 1752 edition with supplement, dated 1756, both vols. in 1, containing 240 portraits of illustrious persons engraved by Desrochers, and the two plates of the massacre of Saint-Barthelemy and of the assassination of Henry IV. inserted’ (ibid., p. 238). With regard to our Terence, it would seem that Gosford kept duplicate copies of both the 1717 and 1772 editions, both of which appeared in the first auction of his library as sold by Toovey, in Paris in 1882 and were subsequently sold by the French booksellers Damascene Morgand the following year.
Provenance:
1. Archibald Acheson, 3rd Earl of Gosford, with his collation note. Seemingly not in the catalogues of 1 May 1882 (Porquet) nor 21 April 1884 (Puttick & Simpson).
2. With the family bookplate of Henry Benjamin Hanbury Beaufoy FRS (1786–1851), MP for Hackney, philanthropist, vinegar factory owner, and keen hot-air balloonist. Christie’s, Catalogue of a Portion of the Valuable Library of Books & Manuscripts formed during the early part of the last century by Henry B.H. Beaufoy, Esq. (7 June 1909), lot 238 (’ruled in red throughout, and illustrated with the series of plates by Picart, calf extra (rebacked with morocco)’).
3. James Tregaskis, The 851st Caxton Head Catalogue (1922), no. 100, offered at £5 10s; a cutting of another Tregaskis catalogue of the 1920s (in which this is no. 266) has been pasted to the front free endpaper.
4. Bookplate of the bibliophile travel historian Boies Penrose II (1902–1976), evidently entering the market before the sale of his library in two parts in 1971.
5. Purchased from a London bookseller in 1960 and presented to Theo Zinn, senior Classics master at Westminster School, as a gift from some of his pupils.
ESTC T137489; Brunet IV, col. 718; Gaskell 46; Dibdin II, p. 477 (’printed in the usually beautiful style of the impressions of ancient classical authors by this printer’; Straus and Dent 93. See Davis, The Lost Gutenberg (2019); De Ricci, pp. 156–7; Lewine, Bibliography of Eighteenth Century Art and Illustrated Books (1898).
SKU: 2124309