January 2021 Catalogue

5 Required Reading January 2021 “Do ye hear the children weeping and disproving, O my brothers, what ye preach? For God’s possible is taught by His world’s loving— And the children doubt of each.” —“The Cry of the Children” First Edition Of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Poems , 1844, Warmly Inscribed By Her Husband, Acclaimed Poet Robert Browning 3. BROWNING, Elizabeth Barrett. Poems. London, 1844. Two volumes. Small octavo, late 19th-century full brown morocco gilt, custom clamshell box. $17,500. Click for more info First edition, mixed issue, one of only 1500 copies printed, warmly inscribed by Barrett’s husband, the poet Robert Browning, after her death: “By desire of the owner of this book, I append my name, with pleasure. Robert Browning. March 25-’86.” The copy of LouiseWhitfield Carnegie, a prominent philanthropist and the wife of Andrew Carnegie, with her bookplates, beautifully bound in full morocco-gilt by Zaehnsdorf. Published the year before her courtship with Robert Browning began and six years after the critical and public success of The Seraphim , Elizabeth Barrett’s Poems “was so highly regarded that, when Wordsworth died in 1850, her name was widely canvassed as his most appropriate successor as poet laureate” (Drabble, 138). This edition does not contain “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” first published in the 1850 second edition, but does contain many of Browning’s best-loved poems. Without advertisements. Mixed issue, with corrected text in Volume I on p. 141 (“Let your flood / Of bitter scorndashonme!”), correct pagenumbers inVolume II pp. 160 and 163, and “The End” on last page of text. “Not only do copies exist containing mixed sheets of each impression, but also most ‘sets’ are made up of volumes from the different impressions” (Barnes A5). It is unclear whether the original inscribee was Louise Whitfield Carnegie, Andrew Carnegie’s wife and a distinguished philanthropist in her own right. While the volumes bear her bookplates, Carnegie wrote in a letter that she first met Browning a year after this inscription at Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee over the week of June 22, 1887. Interior fine, slight rubbing and toning to extremities, front joint of Volume I partially split. Near-fine condition.