Thomas Dibdin, 1842

DIBDIN, Thomas Frognall (1776-1847). Bibliomania; or Book-Madness; A Bibliographical Romance Illustrated with Cuts. New and improved Edition, to which are now added Preliminary Observations, and a Supplement Including a Key to the Assumed Characters in the Drama. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1842.

An impressively extra-illustrated copy of Dibdin’s famed work on collecting. The work includes numerous illuminated manuscript fragments, hand-colored illustrations, autograph letters signed, and engraved plates. 500 copies of this "new and improved edition" were printed, of which 50 (according to Huth) or 55 (according to Church) were large-paper.

Two volumes expanded to three. Large paper octavo (275 x 180mm). (Light, scattered foxing internally.) Extra-illustrated with a 16^th century miniature (140 x 120mm); six autograph letters from Dibdin to the publisher and others; approximately 14 leaves from a small (90 x 62mm) 15^th century illuminated manuscript, a few with foliate borders, one with an ornamented 7-line capital and five others with 5-line capitals; John Bon and Mast Person, 10 pp., printed on vellum by J. Smeaton, 1807; a leaf from a Shakespeare folio; a “private plate of Hogarth etched by my father from the original picture in his possession” as identified in manuscript by the son of Samuel Ireland; and 309 diverse plates (some hand-colored), from a variety of sources, including many specimens of printing such as title pages, broadsides, frontispiece portraits, etc. Blue morocco by Ringer, foliate gilt borders on covers, gilt turn-ins, gilt-spines in six compartments with gilt lettering in two (wear to extremities, particularly at joints and spine ends).