Description

8vo., First Edition thus, with title and text in blue and black, coloured frontispiece, 3 coloured plates, numerous monochrome illustrations (3 full-page) in the text and illustrated endpapers, neat contemporary signature on frontispiece recto; original pictorial blue buckram, snow goose motif blocked in white and black on upper board, backstrip lettered in white, a very good, bright, clean, crisp copy in unclipped dustwrapper, the latter very lightly age-soiled, chipped (just affecting lettering) at head of backstrip, and neatly reinforced on inner surface. FIRST APPEARANCE OF SCOTT'S CLASSIC ILLUSTRATED EDITION. The frontispiece portrait of Fritha is modelled on Scott's first wife, novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard: 'I stood for hours, holding a pillow, which he turned into the wounded snow goose' (Howard's memoirs). VERY SCARCE IN THE DUSTWRAPPER.