I have mentioned fairies,
once on the 6th, when I mentioned a fairy ring that had appeared in the garden, and again on the 7th. when I mentioned one of the greatest fairy artist of them all Richard Dadd, and then today I saw this,
the 1838 The Fairy Annual, published in London by Joseph Robins,
with a portrait frontispiece of Queen Victoria,
the editor of this anthology is listed as Robin Goodfellow,
noted as being attendant sprite to their Majesties Oberon and Titania at
Moonbeam palace, Elfinland, it is a charming collection of poems and stories
related to elves and fairies, the book has an engraved title page, and 18 plates, the
plates to this copy are uncoloured. Some other copies have appeared in commerce
with hand-coloured plates,
the illustrations to this work have been engraved by Mr Rogers after designs by H corbould, G Cruikshank, M Destouches, G Grenier, T Harper, AA M Huffam, T Stothard, H Thomson and Sir Joshua Reynolds, it is an extremely scarce work, with no institutional copies listed in the U.K on LibraryHub and the OCLC. Worldcat states the only institutional copies are held in the United States,
in the colophon it states that this was printed by Richard Watts, the book is in
the publisher's original binding, and is incredibly scarce, featuring both
poems and prose, this work states in the dedication that it was printed in the dominions
of Titania and Oberon, the book itself is a miniature, it is only 1.5" by
1.25", well think about it, fairies are not exactly big, so how could they
handle a full sized book? you can find the book at Rooke Books, for sale on this page, yours for just £3,700.00, what a wonderful miniature treasure, if only they were real, or perhaps there really are fairies, but we are just too old to see them?
No comments:
Post a Comment