The Reliques of Father Prout, Late P.P. of Watergrasshill, in the County of Cork, Ireland.

This mid 19th century illustrated leather bound book, Father Francis Mahoney's The Reliques of Father Prout, is a reprint by Bohn's Illustrated Library in the 1860s, originally published in 1836.

Title: The Reliques of Father Prout, Late P.P. of Watergrasshill, in the County of Cork, Ireland.
Author: Reverend Francis Mahoney (Collected and Arranged by Oliver Yorke, Esq.)
Publisher: H.G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden, London.
Illustrator: Alfred Croquis
Edition: New Edition, Revised and Largely Augmented.
Binding/description: Binding by Whitman Bennett (New York), gilt-decorated 3/4 green leather, with five raised bands, green cloth covered boards, gray marbled endpapers, upper gilt leaf edge, trifold frontispiece, profusely illustrated text.

Author Note: Father Mahoney had quite a sense of humor. He professed discovery of the originals in Latin, Greek, or mediaeval French of popular modern poems and songs. Many of these jeux d'esprit were collected as Reliques of Father Prout. He pretended that these poems had been found in Fr. Prout's trunk after his death.

Binder Note: Whitman Bennett was a successful journalist (assistant drama editor of the New York Times), and in the theater, was a production manager for Famous-Lasky and Paramount Studios, before he entered the rare book business. His firm, Bennett Book Studios, established in 1924, specialized in American and English literature and fine bindings. Collectors came to depend on the Bennett Studios to stock first editions and standard sets of the works of writers such as Hawthorne, Byron, Dickens, Clemens, Whittier, Poe, Melville, Emerson, Washington Irving and Henry James.
Dimensions: 2ʺW × 5.25ʺD × 7.5ʺH.
Condition Notes: Near fine; gently sunned/darkened spine cover, gilt loss at end of upper gilt leaf edge, some light and sparse sporadic foxing throughout text in peripheral areas, light-moderately age-toned pages, strong square spine.