Harris, Moses
An Exposition of English Insects
Estimate: £400 - £600
Auction: 18 June 2025 from 10:00 BST
Description
London: printed for the author, 1776. First edition, first issue (see note), 4to, [4] viii 166 [4] pp., contemporary half calf, title-pages in English and French (both dated 1776), engraved hand-coloured ‘Scheme of Colours’ plate, 50 plates all engraved and hand-coloured by Harris from his own drawings, heightened in gum arabic, most plates (all except nos. 1-6, 8, 10 and 13) with contemporary manuscript captions to head, front board detached, spine worn, title-pages spotted, plate 8 with small hole [Lisney 240]
Footnote
With first-issue title-pages dated 1776, but without the engraved portrait of the author and An Essay preceding a Supplement to the Aurelian. According to Lisney these are required for ‘an ideal copy of the of the first issue of the first edition’, but ‘such copies are exceedingly rare … Possible reasons for this discrepancy are that many of the original subscribers arrange for their copies to be bound before the supplementary material … [was] supplied; or, alternatively, that although the latter were available they did not effect a ready sale’. The plates in this work appear to have been printed without captions apart from the numbering of the figures within each plate, leaving contemporary owners (or perhaps Harris himself) to supply the lacunae in manuscript, with variations noted between different copies inspected.