Plain or Ringlets?
London: Bradbury, Agnew, & Co., 1888. Illustrated by John Leech. Later Edition. Octavo, viii, [2], 406 pages, bound in quarter brown leather over marbled boards with the binder’s stamp of Spink & Gabor, N.Y., on the rear endpaper. Spine with raised bands, gilt-lettering and decoration. Top edge gilt. Illustrated throughout with 12 hand-colored plates, also in black-and-white. Plain or Ringlets? is one of Robert Smith Surtees’s celebrated comic sporting novels, offering a lively satire of fox hunting, fashionable society, courtship, and country-house life in Victorian England. Through a cast of eccentric sportsmen, ambitious social climbers, and sharply drawn aristocratic characters, Surtees combines humor with detailed observations of hunting customs and rural manners. Illustrated by John Leech with hand-colored plates, the book is especially admired for the close relationship between its text and images, which together vividly capture the pageantry, absurdities, and social rivalries of the nineteenth-century sporting world. Some discoloration and foxing, a few small tears and losses, some edges remain uncut and unopened, else in very good condition. Item #495
Price: $200.00