The Poetical Works of Joseph Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase. GILFILLAN (Rev. George) - editor.

With Memoirs and Critical Dissertations by the Rev. George Gilfillan.

First Edition. 8vo. [219 x 139 x 30 mm]. xxxiii, [i], 386 pp. Contemporary binding by C. Cross (signed with an ink pallet at foot of verso of front free endleaf) in half calf, marbled paper sides, the spine divided into six panels with gilt tooled raised bands, lettered in the second and third on maroon goatskin labels, the others with a crowned floral tool and sprigs, marbled endleaves and edges. (Slightly rubbed, with a tiny patch of insect activity at head of rear cover).
Edinburgh: [printed by Ballantyne and Company for] James Nichol; London: James Nisbet & Co; Dublin: W. Robertson, 1859.

A very good copy in a very well preserved and neatly executed binding, signed "C. Cross Binder To The Queen". Another binding with the same signature, on a copy of Broderip's Leaves from the Notebook of a Naturalist, 1852, was item 434 in my catalogue of Particular Bindings [from the collection of John Collins] and is now in the British Library. Spawn and Kinsella, Ticketed Bookbindings from Nineteenth-Century Britain, 426, list a binder's stamp "Cross, Binders To the King", on a book dated 1892 from the E. P. Wormersley collection. This must have been bound after Edward VII became King in 1901. There are 117 books signed by Cross in the Royal Collections, most of them at Sandringham, the last dated c.1910. There is no entry for a C. Cross in Maurice Packer's Bookbinders of Victorian London.

Stock no. ebc6673