OLD EDITIONS

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 60, 12 March 1927, Page 20

OLD EDITIONS

BURNS:S POEMS AND "PICKWICK"

IN WRAPPERS.

In the vicissitudes through which Eobert Burns passed there is a fragrant relief in the friendship between him and the warm-hearted James, Earl of Glencairn. Naturally, his patron was one of the subscribers to the first Kilmarnock edition of Burns's poems issued in 1786 at three shillings, ■ when the poet was only 27. The success o.f this publication, due to the friendly counsel of the blind poet, Thomas Blacklock, dissuaded Burns from taking his passage out to Jamaica, where he had been offered the post of bookkeeper on a slave plantation. These 3s survivors occasionally appear at Sotheby's, and recently the actual copy, with the Earl of Gleneairn's book-plate in support of its original ownership, brought £780. It caused one to recall the last couplet in Burns's "Lament" on the death of his friend:— .

But I'll remember thee, Glencairn, And a' that thou hast done for me. The. maximum for a Kilmarnock Burns remains at £1600, given by the Rosenbachs in the Carysfort sale, 2nd July, 1923, a copy which was in an almost perfect state of preser\ ation and had been originally owned by the dilettante poet, Frederick Locker-Lampson. Then it had passed to the American collection of W. Van Antwerp, whence it was sold for £700 in 1907. The Hoe copy of the work realised £1160 in the New York sale, 1911. As for the appropriately perfect example in the Burns Museum at Alloway, it was bought for that institution at. the round sum of £1000, having cost Mr. Yeitch £10.

Another popular favourite, Charles Dickens,.was represented by a set of the first numbers, in their original

wrappers, of "Pickwick," 183G-7. It is one of the curiosities of collecting that the value of such first numbers depends largely upon the completeness of the contemporary advertisements which accompanied them. Somo were missing or mutilated in the set (sent from Goldersgreen), yet tho final bid was as high as £470. An edition of Boswell's "Life of Johnson" was enhanced by upwards of 900 portraits, drawings, and manuscripts, which extended the affair to sixteen portly volumes. Among tho interesting documents was the manuscript of Sir Joshua Eeynolds's remarks on the attitude of George 111. in forbidding the Eoyal Academy to subscribe to Dr. Johnson's monument. The last bid, £520 for this mass of Johnsouiana could not have repaid the original "grangcriser" for his time, trouble, and expense. Kobert Bloomfield's original fifty-seven leaves of his manuscript poem, "The Farmer's Boy," along with the 1814 volume of his "Poems," brought £.150, and the total of the four days' sale reached £11,847; the Stevenson rarity of tlie 1885 "Laureat Stc'cnson to the Thnnison Class" bringing £1(50, and a manuscript collection of songs and dances for tho lute by John Dowland and others, circa 1600, £390. Among these was tho old ballad of "Greensleeves," and it is permissible to wonder whether Falstafß had the old song in his mind when he was babbling.