Bacon, Francis

The Essays of Bacon

London, England, UK: Arthur L. Humphreys, 1903. First Edition Thus. Hardcover. “He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from unmarried or childless men, which both in affection and means have married and endowed the public….When a man should marry? A young man not yet, an elder man not at all” (Abridged Qtn. from pp. 34-37). Offered here is a perceptibly ornate edition of “Essays” by “the father of Empiricism,” Francis Bacon (1561-1626). Bacon is known, primarily to this writer as a model for the development of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s prose style. It’s important to note, here that the credit given to Bacon was awarded him by Emerson, himself — as covered in Robert D. Richardson’s excellent biography, “Ralph Waldo Emerson: the Mind on Fire.” Readers of Bacon, Emerson, or both would likely note in addition that the extent to which Bacon served Emerson as a “model” most accurately relates to their mutually developed penchant for declamation, — which is something of a rhetorical centrality in the writing of both. This edition of Bacon is further endowed by the presence of an original bookplate by the noted designer & celebrated antiquarian, Dorothy Sturgis Harding (1891-1978). The daughter of a noted Boston architect, Harding began her professional schooling early — enrolling at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1910. To be a fan of Sturgis Harding is actually not as uncommon as one might think — as she was recognized, & also employed by numerous vaunted institutions. Among the most prestigious of these was the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, “whose directors employed Mrs. Harding to illustrate bulletins and design bookplates." She was also a personal friend and correspondent of various notables—two of whom include Eleanor Roosevelt (whom she corresponded with heavily for a ten-year period, beginning in 1927)—and later, Norman Rockwell (1960-1971). The last and most curious of relations to Sturgis Harding worth noting here is the letters of 1908-1909 that Harding received from the canonical American humorist & writer, Samuel Langhorne Clemens (better known to most as "Mark Twain," the epochal American writer-&-firebrand). Sturgis Harding was one of Twain’s “angel-fish" (i.e., "a group of children with whom he established a warm friendship") in his waning, twilight years. One thing we at TMB will take pains to note is that the spelling of Sturgis is different on the bookplate: and it’s about as hard to imagine that she misspelled her own last name as it is to imagine that there existed another “Dorothy Sturges” who happened to have her name on a bookplate (on a book by Bacon, & resembling her designs, no less). Other volumes of Bacon (also containing bookplates by Dorothy Sturgis Harding) have come to market at earlier times, so...while a Burroughsian cut-up quandary is technically possible, we at TMB contend this is a Sturgis Harding Bookplate inside a rare 1903 edition of essays by Francis Bacon, and not some cosmic mix-up. As for the volume of Bacon itself, we at TMB found the task of securing what we call “comps” (and the entire research arc for this curation, in fact) a vastly more challenging task than normal, this go-round. Imagine “deer hunting with a precision bow” one minute and switching to spear-throwing the next. The situation (and sensation) are similar, metaphorically. Scholastic errands are part of the curation process, but it is rare that an item is so obscure, elusive or categorically impenetrable that it's almost as if we’re hunting-by-spear. This is, however, the branch from which this lot must flit: the place we curatorially “find ourselves." With that in mind, we’ll now unfurl all the information we were able to obtain regarding this item. For starters: similar editions—those published by Arthur L. Humphreys of London in 1903—feature a “Contemporary Arts and Craft binding by Ellen G. Woolrich of full brown crushed morocco, covers tooled in gilt with wide floral border”—with variant designs emerging here, at this demarcation point. The volume of "Essays" offered here, in comparison has a “Lily Flower” design (see photos) that is more ornate than the adjacent, cousinly reference-comps we were able to locate elsewhere. Before closing, we must relay a final curiosity. Namely, a binding notation is nowhere to be found! We believe this is almost certainly from the Ellen Woolrich Workshop (as it convincingly though adjacently seems something of a “genetic match” to a similar edition of Bacon (i.e. one also published by Humphries in 1903; a volume with similar ornament, & in similar condition to that offered here). For these reasons in concert, we will offer this perplexingly rare edition of Essays by Bacon for a lower rate than we otherwise might—making this lot a potential steal for the most obsessive and totalizing of Baconians. We are Burroughsians, not Baconians here at Third Mind Books—and thus implicitly accept that a handful of people (somewhere on earth) may know more than us about this. For all such sportsmen—Baconians & others who partake in the Big-Game Hunting of international bibliophilia — this lot, as it happens, might be calling your name. In strong Very Good condition with light rubbing to dark brown leather, gilt & cloth binding (gilt on spine & covers ever-so-slightly dimmed but mostly intact); mild wear at edges & corners incl. slight loss of surface color; slight browning to cloth portions of covers esp. at/ near edges; mild browning & occasional spotting to front, back covers & spine-edge of same, & similar artifacts present along lower edges of text block (both untrimmed as issued); without dust jacket (undoubtedly as issued in this special binding) otherwise laudably and pleasingly clean. Near Fine. [Item #6620]

Price: $350.00