1793 GAY'S FABLES, WITH 12 PLATES BY WILLIAM BLAKE

(BLAKE, William) GAY, John. Fables… With a Life of the Author. London: John Stockdale, 1793. Two volumes bound in one. Royal octavo, contemporary three-quarter calf rebacked, red morocco spine label, marbled boards. $2200.

Lovely first Stockdale edition, first issue, with 70 full-page copper-engraved plates, including 12 engravings by William Blake.

"Blake's career as an engraver of the designs of others can be appropriately represented by Gay's Fables and Stedman's Narrative of the 1790s" (Ray, 7). While Blake's illustrations for Gay are based on earlier designs, he could not resist adapting them to his own style, which is particularly evident in "The Shepherd and the Philosopher," "The Miser and Plutus," and "The Persian, the Sun, and the Cloud." This edition also contains Lovegrove's amusing plate, accompanying Fable XIV, entitled "The Monkey Who had Seen the World," which depicts Thomas Paine preaching from the Rights of Man to a circle of primates. In Fable X, a bookseller invites a literate elephant to write about the foibles of mankind, on which proposal the elephant defers: "Leave man on man to criticize… No author ever spar'd a brother." First issue, with swash "s" throughout. Volume II bound without the List of Subscribers at the rear, but with the Advertisement leaf among the preliminaries, eliminated in the second edition. Keynes 106. Bentley 460. Essick, xxvi. Bookplate.

Light foxing to plates, chiefly marginal; expert restoration to corners. A very nice copy in contemporary marbled boards.