Notes on Nursing: What it is, and what it is not by NIGHTINGALE, Florence (1820-1910)

London: Harrison and Sons, no date [circa 1898]. [Medicine] ORIGINAL CLOTH, a later printing. Octavo (22 x 14cm), pp.79; [1]. Advertisements printed onto the coated yellow endpapers, the latest being a January 1897 printing of the War Office List. Publisher's embossed green cloth with gilt titles to upper board. Textblock shaken, some splitting to the gutters. Cloth rubbed and worn to board edges and joints. A nice survival of a fragile publication. Very good. A terribly complex book, bibliographically speaking. Victor Skretkowicz, who studied over 100 copies and found a vast array of variations in binding, end-paper shade and type setting, as well as textual differences, concludes that 'given the considerable number of different states of each inner and outer form in every sheet, the idea of attempting to establish with certainty any specific 'issue' of `Notes on Nursing' beyond the first is utterly impractical' (The Library, March 1993).