Thoughts On the Prospect Of a Regicide Peace, In a series of Letters. by [BURKE (Edmund).] - 1796

London, Printed for J. Owen, No. 168, Piccadilly, 1796. Demy 8vo in half sheets; half-title not present; Publisher’s Appeal leaves (pp.[I]-IV) on thicker paper), followed by a stub conjugate with the title leaf; pp.[ii]+IV+131+[i (blank)]; A^{1 (?ex2)}, a², B - I, K - R⁴, S²; modern half-calf, marbled boards, uplettered gilt on spine. Fine copy. Originally issued stabbed and sewn through, stab-holes being faintly visible at the inner margins throughout. The first of eleven editions in this year, and technically a piracy, though Burke placed the ms. in Owen’s hands, and then spent three months in correcting and re-correcting it before quarreling with the publisher and trying to withdraw it. Owen tells the story with much circumstantial detail and naming of witnesses in his inserted ‘Appeal To the Candour and Justice of the Nation’ (which may have replaced an authorial dedication leaf represented by the stub). The dispute arose out of the circumstances surrounding the publication of another pamphlet, ‘A Letter from the Right Honourable Edmund Burke to a Noble Lord, on the Attacks made upon him and his Pension in the House of Lords’, published for Burke by Owen earlier in the same year. Todd, 66a; this title not in Rothschild. In this copy the closing parenthesis is lacking after the page number of p.5, and leaf R2 is mis-signed ‘R’. All books listed by Robert Temple are first editions unless otherwise stated.