BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER. [with] A NEW VERSION OF THE PSALMS OF DAVID

Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1823, 1825. 252 x 160 mm. (10 x 6 1/2). [372] leaves.
Contemporary maroon morocco, covers with gilt fillet frame, volutes at corners, blind-stamped ornament at center, rebacked (though without consummate skill), preserving original backstrip (some minor restoration of corners as well), raised bands, spine compartments with four spiraling gilt volutes, gilt lettering, new endpapers, front hinge reinforced, all edges gilt. WITH AN EXCELLENT FORE-EDGE PAINTING OF WALTHAM ABBEY. ◆Half a dozen small abrasions to boards, corners somewhat bumped, but the rebacked binding entirely solid; occasional minor foxing to leaves, otherwise extremely nice internally, and with the fore-edge painting well preserved.

Attractively printed at the Clarendon Press, this quarto edition of the Book of Common Prayer and Psalms provides a large canvas for our fore-edge artist. The painting is recognizable as the work of the so-called "Dover Painter," the name given by Jeff Weber to the artist who produced very high quality painted fore edges in the 1920s and 1930s. We can see his distinctive style of applying dabs of paint, particularly in the trees and sky here, a technique that almost suggests a quasi-pointillism. The Dover Painter did work for the famous London bookseller Marks & Company, for Dawson's Bookshop in Los Angeles, and for J. W. Robinson Company, the Los Angeles department store. Estelle Doheny (1875-1958), whose library comprised one of the great collections of the 20th century, bought actively from Dawson's, and Weber estimates that approximately half of the very considerable number of especially fine fore-edge paintings in the Doheny collection in Camarillo, California--the most extensive such collection ever assembled--were done by the Dover Painter. The scene here features the charming village of Waltham Abbey in Essex, just north of London. The abbey church looms in the background, while the foreground is dominated by a stone bridge with a gothic-arched gate at one end. Two men linger on the bridge to chat, a worker has just crossed the bridge pushing a wheelbarrow, an elderly gentleman with a cane moves toward the crossing, and two women gossip by the river. It is a vignette both tranquil and lively..