Riding Recollections

Leipzig : Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1879. Leather. Very Good. 6" by 4.5. None. A nice copy of Whyte-Melville's thoughts on horse riding, dating from the mid nineteenth century. Copyright Edition. With a bookseller's label for D. Nutt, London, to the rear pastedown. With a bookbinder's stamp for Laufmann to the verso of the front free endpaper. George John Whyte-Melville (18211878) was a Scottish novelist of the sporting-field and a poet. He achieved immediate success as a writer of fox-hunting stories with his first novel Digby Grand in 1854. Having served as a captain in the Coldstream Guards between 1846 and 1849, he volunteered as a major of irregular Turkish cavalry when the Crimean War began. Bones and I, or The Skeleton at Home is an anomaly to the corpus of his work, since it is far from the worlds of the hunting field or the historical romance. Instead Bones and I centres upon an urban recluse who lives in a small, modern villa situated in a London cul de sac looking out upon "the dead wall at the back of an hospital." His most famous lyric is also unusual in its unexpected deep melancholy - the words to Paolo Tosti's song Good-bye! He met his death while hunting. In a half calf binding with marbled boards. Externally, very smart. Some light rubbing to the extremities. Internally, firmly bound. Pages are bright and generally clean with some light foxing to the rear endpapers. Very Good