Fine Books & Manuscripts, including Americana

Lot #310:

[BINDING]. MILTON, John. Paradise Regain’d. A Poem. In IV B...

[BINDING]. MILTON, John. Paradise Regain’d. A Poem. In IV Books. To which is added Samson Agonistes. London: for John Starkey, 1680. 8vo (165 x 108 mm). With leaf A1 with license printed verso before title, 4pp. publisher’s catalogue at end. Late 19th century brown levant completely covered with a green morocco inlay background on both covers with gilt stippling and leafy foliage with red morocco inlay buds and brown morocco stems with a black morocco inlay border, covers with a central panel of brown levant morocco within a black morocco inlay frame, spine in 6 compartments with 5 raised bands, black morocco inlays in 5 compartments with geometric gilt fillets, gilt–titling in remainder, all edges gilt, gilt turn ins, GILT STAMP–SIGNED BY ALFRED DE SAUTY (1870–1949). Provenance: Sold at the Henkels sale of the “Magnificent Library of the late Howard T. Goodwin”, 22–23 October 1903, lot 256; James Cox Brady (bookplate), a famous New York traction magnate and the largest shareholder of the American Tobacco Company making him one of the thirty richest Americans in 1918. Second edition, which includes a separate title–page for Samson Agonistes, all with continuous pagination and register as usual. A SUMPTUOUS BINDING from the famous Howard T. Goodwin sale, known as a collector of the “rarest books and the most sumptuous editions of the works of favorite authors” and was considered the “finest collection of books ever offered at public sale, either in Europe of America” (See Henkels catalogue remarks). De Sauty was known for his excellent craftsmanship of binding, and as Sarah Prideux notes in Modern Bookbindings that his work “is of considerable merit. His inlays are distinguished for the taste shown in the association of colours, and his finishing has some of the brilliant qualities of the French school, seen particularly in the finely studded [i.e. pontillé] tooling of which he seems particularly found”. ESTC R300; Grolier, Wither to Prior 614; Tidcombe, “The Mysterious Mr. De Sauty” in “For the Love of the Binding. Studies in Bookbinding History Presented to Mirjam Foot” (2000), pp. 329-36; Wing M0253.