Old English Clocks: Being a Collector's Observations on Some Seventeenth Century Clocks

Ditchling, England: St. Dominics Press, 1931. First Edition. Hardcover. Very good/Fair. 9 by 11-1/2 inches. "With over fifty plates taken from photographs of the finest specimens." Privately printed in an edition of 300 copies on handmade paper, with most of the illustrations printed separately and tipped in. A classic English clockbook, printed by Hilary Pepler at Ditchling, an intentional Roman Catholic artistic community that produced Arts and Crafts handwork.

While supposedly limited to 300 copies, it appears that there were extra copies bound up outside of the normal print run. These extra copies are not numbered, are seen in quarter-cloth and plain boards, and in dust jackets. The regular run of 300 were cloth and leather and were presumably issued without jacket (at least your cataloguer has been unable to locate record of a numbered copy in a jacket). A very good copy; wear to spine ends and some spotting to the cloth. In a jacket missing most of its spine and reinforced with tape at the folds. Even so, the book is scarce and its hard to imagine than there were more than 30-odd out-of-series copies with jackets. This copy has an ownership signature dated 1939, establishing an outer limit for when the books were bound up and sold.