Miscellaneous Poems, By John Byrom, M.A by BYROM (John)

F.R.S. Sometime Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, And Inventor of The Universal English Short-Hand. In Two volumes. Manchester: Printed by J. Harrop, 1773. 2 Vols., post.8vo (some copies are watermarked, but v. note); fine headpiece to each volume engraved on copper by J. Hall after J. Legard; half-titles with Errata on verso (5 entries in volume one, three in volume two); pp.[4]+vi+352; [4]+vi+353+[i (blank); nineteenth century brown buckram, ruled blind on sides, paper spine labels printed in red and black; a.e. burnished red; end-papers faced deep yellow. Cloth a little worn at extremities of spine and labels dusty; facsimile prelims in each volume on paper dated 1814 (v. note); otherwise a fine copy. Copy on superfine paper, watermarked with a Strasbourg bend rather than a post-horn as with the ordinary copies. The facsimiles are mysterious: a further collected edition of Byrom’s poems was published in 1814 with a Leeds imprint, and we can only think that some sets of sheets of the original edition had remained unbound, but without prelims., and that somebody (perhaps the original printer, Harrop) had taken the opportunity to work them off, supplying them with new prelims. that were facsimiles of the originals. The binding does not look like a binder’s cloth. We would guess that it dates from about the 1840s or 1850s, and it is not impossible, given that the book had survived already for some forty years at least before the prelims. were produced, and had then to compete with a later edition, that it represents an original, albeit rather late, publisher’s binding batch. Printed some ten years after the author’s death, among much entertaining verse, these volumes include the first appearance of the names ‘Tweedledum and Tweedledee’ (in an “Epigram on the Feuds between Handel and Bononcini”) and the well-known Protestant hymn “Christians Awake”. The volume numbers appear only on the half-titles. ESTC, T227682 (variant); Foxon, p.101; NCBEL, 2: 1655. All books listed by Robert Temple are first editions unless otherwise stated.