BYRON, GEORGE GORDON NOEL, LORD | Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. A Romaunt. London: Thomas Davison for John Murray; William Blackwood, Edinburgh; John Cumming, Dublin, 1812

Property from an Important Southern Collection

BYRON, GEORGE GORDON NOEL, LORD  

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. A Romaunt. London: Thomas Davison for John Murray; William Blackwood, Edinburgh; John Cumming, Dublin, 1812

Large 4to (11 1/8 x 8 5/8 in.; 284 x 219 mm). Uncut, M2 and BB3 canceled, lithographed facsimile of a Romaic letter inserted after p. 226, 2pp. publisher's advertisements at rear. Original drab paper boards with manuscript title to spine in a contemporary hand; recased with original backstrip laid down, minor losses to head- and tail-pieces, lightly rubbed. Housed in a quarter-morocco slipcase. 

First edition of the first two cantos of Byron's masterwork, in original boards

The travels and experiences of Byron's defiant, melancholy outcast "established Byron and Byronism as a temporarily national and centennially international force in the western mind" (PMM 270). Byron's publisher, John Murray, printed the usual 500 copies of the verse epic, which sold out in three days. Murray then printed 10,000 copies each of the subsequent cantos, which proved inadequate to the demand.

LITERATURE:

Grolier, English 68; PMM 270; Wise 50–51; Randolph pp. 19-20

PROVENANCE:

H.P. Kraus, New York, December 1981