Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour

W. A. Townsend & Company, 1859. Hardcover. Fair/No Jacket. Fair ; No jacket. 1859 W. A. Townsend & Company, New York. Later printing of 1856 edition. NOT ex-library. Hardcover has green cloth-covered boards with elaborate blind-stamped cover decorations and gold spine lettering and decorations, including a fox and hounds. Light yellow endpapers. Six color plates, hand-tinted, illustrated by John Leech. Binding strong and intact, with just an inch of the endpaper at the top of the front hinge splitting. Covers are worn and rubbed, with three small but deep scratches on the front. Cloth at the head of the spine is torn and frayed. Corners and spine ends bumped and rounded with tips fraying. Endpapers and first few pages soiled and finger smudged, with light foxing. Gift and ownership inscriptions in pencil on front free endpaper and the following two blank pages, some dated 1873. Pages foxed and age-spotted, with occasional brown finger smudges in the margins. NO highlighting or other markings. A few pages are dog-eared. A few pages have small tears in the edges; one page has a 3-inch tear at center which appears to be a flaw in the paper. The rear pages of the book has a pair of curved dents suggesting that something was once stored in the book, and these dents have propagated noticeably back through about quarter of the book; readability is not affected. Pages moderately and uniformly tanned but still supple; pages closer to plates are more tanned. 425 pages + 3 pages of publisher's advertising. No dust jacket. Carefully packed, shipped in a box.