FORE-EDGE PAINTING; TAYLOR & HESSEY, binders; COWPER, William - Poems by William Cowper

London: Printed for J. Johnson and Co. 1811. Bound by Taylor and Hessey With an Early Twentieth Century Fore-Edge Painting [FORE-EDGE PAINTING]. TAYLOR & HESSEY, binder. COWPER, William. Poems by William Cowper, of the Inner Temple, Esq. In two volumes. A New Edition. London: Printed for J. Johnson and Co. 1811. With an early twentieth century fore-edge painting by an unidentified artist, showing a man and two ladies seated by a fireplace. The man is reading his newspaper and a dog is seated at his feet. Two octavo volumes bound in one (8 5/16 x 5 1/4 inches; 211 x 133 mm.). [i]-xvi, [1]-438; [i]-vi, [2], [1]-427, [1, blank] pp. Bound ca. 1811 by Taylor and Hessey, Booksellers, London. Stamp-signed in gilt on the fore-edges of the boards "Bound and Sold by" [&] "Taylor and Hessey". Full dark red straight-grain morocco, covers elaborately paneled in gilt, spine with three 'double' raised bands, elaborately decorated and lettered in gilt in compartments, decorative gilt board-edges and turn-ins, later pink endpapers, all edges gilt. Soundly but rather crudely rebacked with the original spine laid down. “Taylor & Hessey were busy throughout these fifteen years [1808-1823], not only in publishing and in binding, but also in re-binding books published by others. They issued, among other works, Pope's translation of the Iliad and Thomson's Seasons; but they also put fine bindings upon books by Milton, Crabbe, Cowper, Scott, and others, published by Johnson, or by Sharpe, or by Hatchard, or by Reeves, or by Longman- Taylor & Hessey usually bound their fine books in morocco—red, blue, brown, crimson, green—and "signed" their bindings by stamping their name in gilt in the fore-edge of the binding (not the leaves, note), whenever the boards inside the leather were thick enough to carry the name of the firm- (C.J. Weber, Fore-Edge Painting, pp. 106-7). .

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