POEMS, CHIEFLY IN THE SCOTTISH DIALECT

London: Printed for A. Strahan; T. Cadell; and W. Creech, 1787. Third Edition; First London Edition, First State (with "stinking" instead of "skinking" in "To a Haggis"). 210 x 126 mm. (8 1/4 x 5"). xlviii, [13]-372 pp. With half title and the subscriber list [to the Edinburgh edition].
VERY FINE RED CRUSHED MOROCCO, GILT, BY RIVIERE & SON (stamp-signed on front turn-in), cover with French fillet border, raised bands, spine compartments with acorn-and-lancet central ornament, floral vines at corners, gilt lettering, turn-ins with complex gilt roll, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt. Engraved frontispiece portrait of Burns. Gibson, p. 6; Egerer 2. ◆Perhaps pressed (not washed), but AN ESPECIALLY FINE COPY, quite clean and fresh internally, IN A SPARKLING BINDING with no signs of use.

This is one of the most famous poetic publications in history, offered here in a most attractive copy of the first London printing (following an Edinburgh edition the same year and the extremely rare Kilmarnock first edition of 1786). Burns issued the poems at the age of 27 in order to raise passage money for a voyage to Jamaica, where he had been offered an agricultural post on a plantation. At a time when his contemporaries were searching for the "natural bard" and, in the process, had unearthed poetical threshers, poetical milk maidens, and poetical cobblers, the charming plowman Burns delivered his simple and beautiful lyrics with most propitious timing. He found himself famous almost at once, and his fame has not faltered over time, even though, after the appearance of the present work, he did little during the rest of his life except write songs and drink. The very attractive binding is the work of one of the longest-lived English binderies. Robert Riviere began as a bookseller and binder in Bath in 1829, then set up shop as a binder in London in 1840; in 1881, he took his grandson Percival Calkin into partnership, at which time the firm became known as Riviere & Son. The bindery continued to do business until 1939, when it was acquired by George Bayntun of Bath, a firm that is still producing fine work and is still in family hands..