Fine copperplates
[DARTON, William] The Rational Exhibition. London; Published by Harvey and Darton, No. 55, Gracechurch Street; and Wm. Darton, Holborn-Hill. 1824.

12mo.; original pale pink card wrappers printed in black to both covers; pp. [ii], [3]-59 + [i]; with fine half-page illustrated title-page and 22 additional striking copper-engraved plates (most all but half-page); a wonderful, clean, copy, sometime professionally and skillfully rebacked with consolidation to covers, high quality archival work which is barely discernible; internally very fresh throughout, and unmarked, with crisp leaves and a neat, early ownership inscription in a calligraphic hand, “Ann Allan, Sept. 1829”; very scarce.

New and re-engraved edition, and first edition thus.  First published by the same publisher in 1800.

A superior illustrated chapbook with delightful copperplates rather than the usual woodcuts. The pictures are the core of the book, which works up a conceit in which an elderly woman of the narrator’s acquaintance papered the walls of her home with pictures which had belonged to her grandchildren, to use them as props for the education of the young.  

Here is a hotch-potch of short prose and poetical pieces, in the main reporting recent fantastical, and allegedly true, occurrences, such a bull-dog which hung from the lip of a horse after a savage attack; two tragedies involving candle-fires (one in a draper’s shop near Aldgate); descriptions of remarkable people to be found on the streets of London; an account of a near-drowning incident from a boat; the description of an event off the coast of Newfoundland when a sinking vessel was brought to shore towed by roped and horned bullocks; Pliny’s account of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79, and much else.