Horace Walpole: A Memoir with an Appendix of Books Printed at the Strawberry Hill Press.

DOBSON, Austin; [Theodore Low De Vinne].

$750.00

Item Number: 146607

New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1890.

Signed limited edition of the biography of the 4th Earl of Orford. Royal octavo, original half vellum, tissue-guarded frontispiece, illustrated with several tissue-guarded engravings and tailpieces by Percy and Leon Moran. One of four hundred and twenty-five numbered copies printed on Dickinson paper and signed by American printer and typographer Theodore Low De Vinne on the limitation page, this is number 275. De Vinne was considered “the leading commercial printer of his day,” printing the popular ‘St. Nicholas Magazine’ and ‘The Century Magazine’ for The Century Company as well as several books and multi-volume works such as John Hay’s authoritative biography, ‘Abraham Lincoln: A History.’ He sought to increase printing capacity and co-founded the Typothetae, a trade organization of master printers, which was a predecessor of the Printing Industries of America. In very good condition with rubbing to the extremities.

Horace Walpole was an English writer, art historian, man of letters, antiquarian, and Whig politician of the 1700s. In the midst of his parliamentary career, Walpole had Strawberry Hill House built in Twickenham, southwest London, a Gothic Revival villa that revived the Gothic style some decades before his Victorian successors. In 1964, inspired by a nightmare he experienced at the house, Walpole published 'The Castle of Otranto,' which is generally regarded as the first gothic novel and the pearl of his literary reputation. Set in a haunted castle, the novel merged medievalism and terror in a style that has endured ever since.