Ladies' Old-Fashioned Shoes. With eleven illustrations from originals in his collection. [with:] Supplement to Old-Fashioned Shoes.

Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1885. FIRST EDITION, 2 vols., oblong folio, pp. [viii], [22], 9, [1] + 11 colour lithograph plates; [vi], [12], 10 + 4 colour lithograph plates & 2 black and white plates. Black and white illustrations within pagination, some plates printed with gold or silver inks. Original grey paper boards backed in red roan, boards bordered with black rules, central crest and corner shoe illustrations printed in black, supplement bound in sage green paper wrappers backed in dark green cloth, front wrapper printed in black and bordered with black rules. One leaf in supplement bound upside-down. Leather spine defective, extremities worn, a few small areas of supplement wrappers torn away, corners creased, wrappers lightly soiled. The scarce first book of antiquarian shoe collector Thomas Watson Greig of Glencarse (1837-1912), with the intention ‘to preserve in an intelligible form what is fast crumbling into dust... as well as to to show the variety of shapes and the excellence of the workmanship and design used by our ancestors’ (Preface), based on the the earlier part of his own collection. Greig’s own copy has annotations revealing that only 250 copies were printed, of which he presented 62, though many of these will have been dissected for the attractive plates, now much more often found in framed in galleries than still present in the original form. The supplement was published separately four years later and illustrates four more shoes Greig had acquired since publishing the first volume, alongside some reprinted eighteenth-century drawings. Greig did annotate his own copy with notes for a second edition, but the project never came to fruition, although a companion volume on nineteenth-century shoes appeared in 1900.