AMATEUR WORK ILLUSTRATED - a practical magazine of constructive and decorative art and manual labour, with supplements containing designs and working drawings to scale for various pieces of work, useful and ornamental, & several hundreds of illustrations

London: Ward, Lock, Bowden & Co Volumes 1 - 7, popular re-issue. Not dated, but probably c. 1892 -5 (though the British Library lists seven volumes of this edition, and dates it 1881-88). One of the most elusive of all late Victorian journals for the keen handyman. This set is bound in a simple brown cloth which is a little marked worn and frayed, but generally still very sound, though the spine head of volume two is rather torn, and a hinge cracked in volume five. The contents are generally clean, though the folding plans and plates are ofter printed on an inferior paper which has browned, as have the adjoining pages. There are approximately 24 of these folding plates, and they have all suffered some tearing, though generally not with any loss of text. Two of them are detached, and at least one is now in two halves. Several have been repaired at a much earlier time. I have noticed the odd page loose here and there, but generally the contents are very sound. This work was quite possibly bound up from separately issued parts, and I note that a couple of pages are missing at the start of Volume 1, (and these appear never to have been bound in). Apart from this I believe it to be complete. [An amazingly encyclopaedic survey of the Victorian industrial/arts& crafts world. A sample of the breadth of information can be gleaned from an extract from the index : Artificial ivory, electricity in bee-keeping, boat-building made easy, boots & shoes : how to make and mend them, brilliant red ink for draughtsmen, cutting glass with a hot iron, electric bells, a mahgnesium flash lamp, gas in the amateur's workshop, metallic designs on glass, gymnastic apparatus and how to make it, how to build a small harmonium, luminous paints, modelling in clay, organ building for amateurs, photographic pastimes, practical gas-fitting, the manufacture of spectacle lenses, sundials and dialling, velocipedes - their construction and use, walking sticks, some hints on conjuring apparatus, smithing and forging, pantograph extraordinary, my marionette theatre, magic-lantern slides, bamboo-work, beehives etc.]. Cloth. Good.