The Repository of Arts, Literature, Fashions, Manufactures, etc.: Complete Year 1825

Very good set of a complete year of this influential magazine, Third Series, Volumes V and VI, 12 monthly issues from January to December 1825 bound in two volumes.

A fascinating view of the taste of London high society in the Regency era, still basking in Wellington's victory at the Battle of Waterloo.

With 59 (of 60) handcoloured engravings of fashion, landscapes, architecture and furniture under tissue guards, 11 engravings of needlework patterns.

Frontispiece, "To Readers and Correspondents," title page, Plate 1, pages 2 and 3 of the January issue provided in facsimile.

Each issue typically with two handcoloured architecture plates, two handcoloured London fashion plates, one handcoloured interior plate (furniture, etc.) and one needlework pattern.

The fashion plates unsigned but attributed to the Arbiter Elegantiarum (Thomas Uwins), and depicting designs by anonymous London milliners and dressmakers. There are elegant dinner and balls gowns, casual morning and promenade dresses, hats and bonnets, and a couple of children's outfits.

The architectural plates are mostly landscapes by John Gendall showing the seats of the aristocracy and the rich. The stately homes include Powderham Castle, the seat of Lord Viscount William Courtenay, 9th Earl of Devon, gay lover of slave owner William Beckford; the Marquis of Exeter's Elizabethan-style Burghley House; Sir Stafford Henry Northcote's Queen Anne-style Pynes; the Duke of Rutland's Gothic Revival Belvoir Castle; Robert Williams Palladian-style mansion Moor Park in gardens by Capability Brown, John Fowles Luttrell's motte and bailey castle Dunster House, etc.

The furniture plates include an air stove designed by May and Morrit of Oxford Street, fashionable chairs inspired by Morell and Hughes, a luxury sofa for a lady's boudoir, a Gothic bookcase, sofa, chairs and hall lamp, and a military-style camp bed with canopy (the Waterloo craze continues),

Ackermann's Repository of Arts ran from 1809 to 1828. At four shillings an issue, it was an expensive magazine, aimed at the very richest of English society. In addition to the luxurious colour plates, the text offered travel writing, poetry, French fashion reports, art gallery reviews, literary criticism, society gossip, music reviews, general news and legal reports.

All the monthly advertising section are bound in the rear of each volume, and include fascinating ads for Irish linen, preserved Jamaica ginger, artificial teeth (the infamous Waterloo Teeth?), Elm's Amboyna lotion and powders for the teeth, Strickland's prepared chocolate, real Normandy Pippins (apples), upcoming shows of alpacas from Peru at the Royal Menagerie, and forthcoming books from the publisher.

Leather bindings with gilt title, year and volume number, spine with five raised bands rubbed and worn with loss to top and bottom, marble boards scuffed, marble endpapers, interior free of foxing, but a few finger smudges and spots, all plates under tissue guards.