one of one hundred large paper copies.
MORANT, Philip. The History and Antiquities of the County of Essex, compiled from the best and most ancient Historians. London, Printed for T. Osborne, [etc.]., 1768.
Folio, two volumes. Contemporary calf, recently rebacked (as most copies), leather spine labels; pp. [10], xxviii, [4], 195, 28 (addenda), [25-28 (addenda), 519; [vi], 646, 9 folding engraved maps, 24 engraved plates, some of them folding; a very good copy.
First edition. Volume 1 includes a 195-page (plus 28-page Appendix), the History of Colchester, which had appeared separately in 1748; however here he author much enlarged and improved it, and incorporated it in the present work. According to ESTC, we are able to offer a large paper copy: 'Printed by William Bowyer; his records show 100 copies printed on demy and 500 on crown ... Ordinary paper issue - gutter 2.7cms; height 35.3m cs' (T147697). Our gutters are 9 cm wide and the paper is 40.5 cm tall. A large paper copy is described in entry T201443 with roughly the same measurements. The first quoted ESTC entry gives as collation of the beginning of the preliminaries 'pp. [6]' whereas our copy has the full set of 10 un-numbered pages. However, it is known that collation often varies from copy to copy.
'The History and Antiquities of Colchester appeared in 1748, the type set by William Bowyer, the leading antiquarian printer of the day. The edition was a small one, of only 200 copies, and its achievement was a matter of anxiety and some disappointment to Morant, whose business sense was not strong. He had probably also excited some local animosity … The History and Antiquities of the County of Essex was published in instalments from 1763 to 1768. The text of volume 2 was completed in 1766, and volume 1, prefaced by a revised edition of the history of Colchester, noting the renewal of the charters in 1763, was celebrated by a new title-page in 1768. The whole work was dedicated to Thomas Barrett-Lennard, seventeenth Baron Dacre, as patron and an energetic promoter of the work. The History of Essex is characterized by learning, common sense, and consistency. Morant's great accomplishment was to devise a plan and fulfil it. He could not sustain the scale of the history of Colchester, but he set a pattern against which other county histories could be measured. Some contemporaries and later readers regretted the absence of epitaphs and of heraldic notes, but the History's manorial descents were exemplary for their time, and even J. H. Round subsequently built on rather than superseded Morant's work' (ODNB).
In the Gentleman's Magazine, volume 35, of 1833 (supplement, p. 3) is a sales list of rare books on British topography, there a large paper copy was advertised for over £16, a rather serious price.
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