Poems by William Cowper

London: Printed for J. Johnson and Co., 1811. Bound by Taylor and Hessey
With an Early Twentieth Century Fore-Edge Painting

[FORE-EDGE PAINTING]. TAYLOR & HESSEY, binder. COWPER, William. Poems by William Cowper, of the Inner Temple, Esq. In two volumes. A New Edition. London: Printed for J. Johnson and Co., 1811.

With an early twentieth century fore-edge painting by an unidentified artist, showing a man and two ladies seated by a fireplace. The man is reading his newspaper and a dog is seated at his feet.

Two octavo volumes bound in one (8 5/16 x 5 1/4 inches; 211 x 133 mm.). [i]-xvi, [1]-438; [i]-vi, [2], [1]-427, [1, blank] pp.

Bound ca. 1811 by Taylor and Hessey, Booksellers, London. Stamp-signed in gilt on the fore-edges of the boards "Bound and Sold by" [&] "Taylor and Hessey". Full dark red straight-grain morocco, covers elaborately paneled in gilt, spine with three 'double' raised bands, elaborately decorated and lettered in gilt in compartments, decorative gilt board-edges and turn-ins, later pink endpapers, all edges gilt. Soundly but rather crudely rebacked with the original spine laid down.

"Taylor & Hessey were busy throughout these fifteen years [1808-1823], not only in publishing and in binding, but also in re-binding books published by others. They issued, among other works, Pope's translation of the Iliad and Thomson's Seasons; but they also put fine bindings upon books by Milton, Crabbe, Cowper, Scott, and others, published by Johnson, or by Sharpe, or by Hatchard, or by Reeves, or by Longman... Taylor & Hessey usually bound their fine books in morocco—red, blue, brown, crimson, green—and "signed" their bindings by stamping their name in gilt in the fore-edge of the binding (not the leaves, note), whenever the boards inside the leather were thick enough to carry the name of the firm... (C.J. Weber, Fore-Edge Painting, pp. 106-7).