FABLES BY JOHN GAY, IN TWO PARTS; To Which are Added Fables by Edward Moore

Paris: At the Printing Office and Stereotype Foundry of P. Didot and of F. Didot, 1800. First of the Edition, the Didot Stereotype edition, with the fine provenance of Henry Lee of the important Boston family. With an engraved frontispiece and title-page. 12 mo, contemporary full tan mottled calf, gilt lettered and elaborately decorated with gilt tooling separating compartments on the spine, with gilt rolled borders to the covers. 235 pp. A handsome copy, the first free-fly and first prelim excised, otherwise the book and text-block are complete. One of Gay's best known works, the fables are not moral tales: "for a Fable he gives now and then a Tale or an abstracted Allegory; and from some, by whatever name they may be called, it will be difficult to extract any moral principle. They are, however, told with liveliness; the versification is smooth; and the diction, though now and then a little constrained by the measure of the rhyme, is generally happy." [Samuel Johnson]
Henry Lee's copy with his bookplate. The Lee family was engaged in early mercantile capitalism in America and was an important figure in its development. The family showed remarkable powers of adaptation to successive forms of capitalism, mercantile, industrial, and financial; and, as opportunity served, they were to do more than their share in promoting the cultural welfare of America.
Of the broad pictures that emerge, is the commercial family compact, the set of families that intermarried and did business with the world, using one another in special positions of trust.
The Lees exported and imported and wholesaled their goods in America. They had ships at sea and were active in the Calcutta trade and the East Indian affairs. It is Henry Lee's bookplate that is affixed here.