Laurence Sterne (24 November 1713 – 18 March 1768) led a fascinating life as an Anglo-Irish novelist and Anglican cleric, an essayist and critic, a playwright and rabble-rouser. He was justly famous for writing novels such as The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and for an affecting A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, a fine travelogue that is the more poignant for the health concerns he suffered throughout. He also published sermons and memoirs and certainly had gained at career’s end, the ears of local landed gentry and national royalty. Raised by a military father and polymath mother, he traveled to Ireland and throughout England, and attended Hipperholme Grammar School in the West Riding of Yorkshire. His father was seconded to Jamaica, where he died of malaria, and so Laurence attended Jesus College, Cambridge, where earned academic honors and both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees through the sponsorship of his father’s brother. His first ecclesiastical satire, A Political Romance, went literally up in flames and so then he turned to writing the many volumes comprising The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, something apparently a bit less flammable. Travelling to France and Italy so as hopefully to escape a pesky, persistent case of tuberculosis, his travelogue was published only weeks before he died anyway, in 1768 of said pulmonary affliction.
His Wikipedia entry surmises that, once dead and buried, his corpse was disinterred, dug up, and sold to anatomists at Cambridge University but then was recognized there and reinterred, so say the rumours. His presumed skull–just his skull–was “found in the churchyard and transferred to Coxwold in 1969 by the Laurence Sterne Trust.”
This set is complete in seven volumes and an apparent First Edition Thus, but Volume 1 appears to be missing a portion of text (see below). The rebinding was done at the Adolphus Bindery in Austin, Texas, by Mark Evans, deploying multicolored paste-paper (mauve and blue, purple and brown), over tan paste-paper over boards. New endpapers front and rear, to each volume, some being multiple, some also being pastepaper. Bound in short hardcover format, each volume measuring 6 7/8″ x 4 1/4″ tall and wide, respectively. Hand-cut beige paper labels to each spine denoting volume number and title. Previous owner’s penned inscriptions (Ira Goodall, of Bath) to all volumes, once (Volume I), thrice. Predictable but light waffling to text-blocks, light foxing mostly to endpapers and page edges, not affecting readability, else clean, tightly bound and unmarked of interior.
A fine and particularly bracing black-and-white engraving of the author in cameo on background, unattributed, at frontis to Volume I, he sporting preternaturally long, claw-like fingers and that goggle-eyed, bemused countenance for which he is best known.
Volume I, first title page, engraved and calligraphic, printed and in cursive, in black-and-white, printed at P. Byrne in Dublin, Ireland in 1794, each volume. Then comes the first half-title, stating “The Works of Laurence Sterne, A.M. Prebendary of York, and Vicar of Sutton on the Forest, and of Stillington near York. To which is prefixed An Account of the Life and Writings of the Author. Vol. I.” Then follows a page of dedication, to Eugenius, the beloved friend of Yorick, then a note from a gentleman admirer of Sterne, an epitaph for the author on his tomb-stone, “By a Lady,” quite fetching, then those two endpapers added again, near identical, then “Some Account of the Life and Writings of Mr. Sterne; [vii], viii-xxiii, then a blank where should be p. 24, then 25-287 pp., comprising three of the first volumes of Tristram Shandy. Thus, the pagination is correct, but p. 25 starts in mid-sentence and is thus missing some as-yet-undetermined number of words. Prior to p. xxiii there are in fact passages of text (not verse), but none so far as I can see have any words that would go logically prior to the “then” that appears as the first word of p. 25.
Volume II, comprising volumes four through six of Tristram Shandy [7], 8-274 pp.; Volume III, the remainder of Tristram Shandy, [5], 6-204 pp.; Volume IV, The Sermons of Yorick, vii [4], 14-311 pp.; Volume V, more The Sermons of Yorick, [7], 8-331 pp.; Volume VI, “The Posthumous Works of Laurence Sterne,” second previous owner’s penned inscription at endpaper, notes from the editor to The Reader, then Sterne’s notes on the Koran, filled with letters to and from the author and to and from his editor here and elsewhere, [13], 14-221 pp.; Volume VII, more Letters and random correspondence, frontis matter, 7-264 pp. The editors have added at finis of p. 264, “Mr. Sterne died in March 1768, soon after the publication of the two volumes of his Sentimental Journey.”
All in, a fine collection to satisfy the Sterne collector, and a fine, attractive exemplar of late-18th century printing in a pretty binding.
Offered by Structure, Verses, Agency Books
$225
To purchase, contact svafinebooks@gmail.com
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