Academy for Grown Horsemen: Containing the Completest Instructions for Walking, Trotting, Cantering, Galloping, Stumbling, and Tumbling. Illustrated with Copper Plates, and Adorned with a Portrait of the Author.

London: Printed for W. Dickinson, 1787. GAMBADO, ESQ., Geoffrey]. An Academy for Grown Horsemen, Containing the Completest Instructions for Walking, Trotting, Cantering, Galloping, Stumbling, and Tumbling. Illustrated with Copper Plates, and Adorned with a Portrait of the Author. London: Printed for W. Dickinson, 1787.

First Edition. With 12 stipple engraved plates including the frontispiece. vi,[3],vi-xx,38 pp. Collates the same as the copy in the ESTC. They mention "Imperfect; wanting B1 of the prelims? - possibly deliberately mis-signed in order to support the 'missing' portion of the author's preface- see editor's note" Editor's note reads "The editor has to lament that the first pages of our Author's work, are amongst those missing, but as the Author himself, in his Preface, seems to have arranged his string of instructions, the Editor thinks himself justified in placing those first that relate to the choice of a horse."

Original drab boards rebacked to style with the original paper label. Boards with wear and soiling. Inner hinges cracked but firm. Foxing, toning and soiling throughout. Chemised and housed in a quarter red morocco slipcase. Very good.

Amateur artist and caricaturist Henry William Bunbury (1750-1811) "drew chiefly in pencil, or black and red chalk; but, although he seems to have used the needle, he was never successful as an etcher, and his designs were generally reproduced by engravers, mostly in stipple or dot...The three works by which he is best known belong...to 1787. They are ‘A Long Minuet, as danced at Bath' (25 June); ‘The Propagation of a Lie' (29 Dec.); and the volume of equestrian misadventures called ‘An Academy for Grown Horsemen,' by ‘Geoffrey Gambado'...In 1791 appeared the ‘Annals of Horsemanship,' a kind of sequel to the ‘Academy for Grown Horseman'" (D.N.B.).

ESTC T18966.

HBS 65498.

$850.