105 GIFTS “Assuredly A Great, A Very Great Work” 165JOHNSON, Samuel) BOSWELL, James. Boswell’s Life of Johnson, including… Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Johnson’s Diary of a Journey into North Wales. Oxford: 1887. Six volumes bound in eleven. Octavo, contemporary full navy morocco gilt. $11,000 First George Birkbeck Hill edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson and Johnson’s travels, extra-illustrated with 1153 finely engraved portraits, views, maps and facsimiles (including many proofs on India paper), and facsimile of handwritten note by Hill tipped in. Hill was a renowned Johnsonian scholar; when the Clarendon Press brought out this six-volume set in 1887, “the edition was accepted as a masterpiece of spacious editing. The index, forming the sixth volume, is a monument of industry and completeness” (DNB). “The fascination of [Boswell and Johnson’s] dialogue, that dialogue of mind, heart and voice round which Boswell organized his great Life, is that it is not merely between two very different men but between two epochs. In its pages, Romantic Europe speaks to Renaissance Europe, and is answered” (Wain, 229). Interiors and added plates clean and fine. Volume I, Part I and Volume III, Part I expertly rebacked with original spine neatly laid down, a few other joints slightly tender or with minor reinforcements, bindings sound. A very handsome and lavishly extra-illustrated set in excellent condition. 166CONAN DOYLE, Sir Arthur. Works. New York, 1902. Thirteen volumes. Octavo, original three-quarter burgundy morocco gilt. $6200 First American issue of the “Author’s Edition” of Doyle’s works, one of 1000 sets, with two photogravure illustrations in each volume and a photogravure portrait of Conan Doyle in The White Company. “The author considered this edition of his works to be of great importance: he revised parts, and added notes and a number of special introductions” (Green & Gibson, A60). In the Preface, Conan Doyle remarks, “It has always been my ambition—the dearer because it appeared to be unattainable—to have a collected edition of my own works… For better, for worse, I have expended all pains in putting these books into their final form, and so I leave them. Outside this edition there is no work of mine up to this date which I do not willingly suppress.” Includes Doyle’s classic Sherlock Holmes novels and stories (A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of the Baskervilles), as well as his stories and historical romances. Interiors fine. Handsome contemporary bindings with minor toning to spines and slight rubbing to some extremities. “There Is Nothing More Deceptive Than An Obvious Fact”
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