Bibliomania; Or, Book-Madness; a Bibliographical Romance. Illustrated with cuts... New and Improved edition, to which are now added, Preliminary Observations, and a Supplement, including a Key to the Assumed Characters in the Drama.

Tall thick 8vo. London: Bohn, 1842. Tall thick 8vo, (2), [i-vii], vii-xiv, 618, 63, (1), xxxiii pp. Full pebbled brown morocco with gilt fillet borders, gilt turn-ins, gilt-panelled backstrip, raised bands, gilt top, rebacked retaining original backstrip. Bookplate on front pastedown of Francis Frederick Fox and Charles Sebag-Montefiore. § First combined edition, large paper copy. The book that introduced the concept of “bibliomania” to the world. “Dibdin's best-known, and, in the later editions, most useful book.” Jackson 19. 500 copies were printed, of which 50 (according to Huth) or 55 (according to Church) were large-paper. The Huntington and Rabaiotti large-paper copies state 55 copies on plate 2 (see above). Bound in white boards (in the Huth sale, in two volumes). Price 3 guineas and 5 guineas according to Lowndes. A sometimes confusing book. The Grolier Club copy has the 1809, 1811, and 1842 prefaces bound at the front; then the 1811 edition precedes the 1809 edition, and the indexes are at the end. The 1809 title is often with the text rather than the preliminaries (as in Barlow’s copy). The Morgan Library copy is bound in a different order. The Huntington Library large-paper copy with a fore-edge painting of Althorp is as the Grolier Club copy. The second Huntington large-paper copy is bound in four volumes and extra-illustrated with 372 plates, including two portraits of Dibdin: a proof of Eldridge’s engraving dated 12 February 1816, and a line engraving after Richmond’s water-color by G. Staal for Le bibliophile français. It is lacking the two-leaf ‘Advertisement.’ There is no separate title to the 1811 edition. Jackson’s pagination conforms to none of these orders. The Bohn sale at Sotheby’s (1868, lot 2636) describes a copy on ‘Large Pink Paper, the only copy so printed,’ offered again by Sotheby’s on 3 June 1997 (library of George Pflaumer); the present owner is Roland Folter. John Priddy has a single-leaf, single-sided prospectus to this edition, dated April 1838, promising a print date of August (not mentioned by Jackson). Windle A 11d.