WILTSHIRE. FONTHILL ABBEY.. Historical Notices of Fonthill Abbey, Wiltshire. With Eleven Plates, and Fifteen other Embellishments.1836

London: Nichols and Son, First edition, 4to (282 x 220 mm), 52pp., engraved frontispiece and 10 engraved plates (light water tidemark to several plates), text illustrations, recent half red morocco, marbled boards, spine gilt with gilt lettered morocco label on upper cover. A compilation on the celebrated Gothic mansion designed by the architect James Wyatt for the famous collector and social outcast William Beckford, put together by the publisher John Bowyer Nichols to provide a narrative history of the house from its conception to the collapse of its central tower in 1825. Nichols 'borrowed' chapters and descriptions from Britton and Rutter's works, reusing ten of the latter's engraved plates and reproducing one rather less well-known illustration from R. C. Hoare's Modern Wiltshire of 1829, showing the house after the disastrous collapse. He also provides a brief new narrative recording the break-up of the Fonthill estate after 1825. Provenance: From the library of Josceline Grove, with bookplate and their typed catalogue description pasted to front endpapers. Scarce, not in Holmes or Cooper.