PBA Galleries

2 volumes. Text volume comprising: engraved title with vignette in sepia and Royal arms on verso; engraved dedication with engraved deer skeleton on verso, 25 leaves of letterpress text incorporating 10 engraved headpieces, 10 initials and 10 tailpieces, 9 full-page illustrations, 1 full-page tail-piece printed in sepia; 56 engraved plates with facing letterpress explanatory text. Plate volume comprising: engraved title with vignette in black (verso blank); 56 duplicate engraved plates before letters (the final plate with an engraved deer skeleton on verso). All engravings by Jacob Schijnvoet and Gerard van der Gucht. (Folio) 19x12¾, modern black morocco-backed marbled paper-covered boards with vellum tips by Hales. First Edition, one of only 400 copies.

First edition of "the most famous and among the most artistically interesting osteological atlases ever produced . . . The great accuracy of the large plates of adult, fetal, and pathological bones lies both in Cheselden's innovative use of the camera obscura, which he was the first to employ for the purpose of book illustration, and in his intervention in the drawing and engraving processes" (Norman). The work was not an immediate success, the author notes in his preface that a lack of subscribers forced him to abandon his original plan for a much more extensive work, and that he had no "more printed in English than three hundred [copies of the present work], and one hundred [sets] of prints are taken off designed for a Latin or french edition, which being finished, the plates shall be destroyed". Blake p.86; Choulant-Frank, p.261; Garrison-Morton 395; Heirs of Hippocrates 814; Lilly p.107; Norman 466; Russell 173; Waller 1941; Wellcome II, p. 335.