a dibdin rarity
preparing to distribute the final version, but it was not as ‘carefully suppressed’ as they had hoped. And there likely are more copies of the earlier version still to be discovered. Perhaps a closer look at extra-illustrated copies of the Tour and related material will reveal those not presently located and others not yet recorded. 1. the revd henry drury (1778–1841), Dibdin’s ‘Menalcus’, had the etchings from Lewis’s Groups inserted in his large-paper copy of the Tour and brought together various pamphlets relating to it, including Lewis’s ‘Statement respecting the Drawings’, in a fourth volume. These were uniformly bound in Venetian or green morocco by Charles Lewis. Drury’s library was sold by Evans in two parts, 19 February–3 March and 12–23 March 1827. The set appeared as lot 1133, followed by twelve separate lots of Lewis’s drawings (which generally sold for less than half what Drury paid in the 1822 sale). William Pickering paid £ 47 5 s , probably on behalf of Philip Augustus Hanrott (1776–1856), who also acquired many of the individual drawings after the sale. The set was described as ‘Mr. Drury’s copy’, still with the additional volume containing illustrative tracts and ‘Lewis’s Remarks on Dibdin’, as lot 359 in the second part of Hanrott’s sale, held by Evans on 5–17 August 1833. Thomas Geeves, a bookseller at 141 Regent Street, paid £ 33 10 s for it. I have not been able to trace it beyond this sale. 2. the copy described by Dibdin as ‘one of singular beauty and perfection, extracting and combining the splendour of three similar copies’ 23 was based not, it would seem, on Drury’s copy but on one owned by George Hibbert (1757–1837), Dibdin’s ‘Honorio’. In the first part of Hibbert’s sale, conducted by Evans on 16 March–4 April 1829, it was lot 2362, a large-paper copy, three volumes, in red morocco by Charles Lewis, with thirteen of Lewis’s original drawings bound in. 24 There is no reference 23 . Reminiscences , p. 697. 24 . None of the drawings are from the Drury sale. The remaining sales were 4–16 May and 25 May–6 June 1829. Hibbert also had a small-paper copy of the Tour , which was lot 8746 in his sale.
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