Unlike Messrs. Dunlop and Wilson of Glasgow, to whom Burns is said, without much authority, to have first offered the poem, Wilson, the printer of the little volume, was not a great or leading publisher; but he succeeded in making a volume that is very charming in appearance, and not without reminders of the French press-work of the period.
A copy of this book sold at the auction of the library of Mr. A. C. Lamb of Dundee, in February, 1898, for the sum of five hundred and seventy-two pounds, five shillings—"the most amazing price ever realized for a modern book."
Octavo.
Collation: 240 pp.
GILBERT WHITE
(1720-1793)
62. The | Natural History | And | Antiquities | Of | Selborne, | [Two lines] With | Engravings, And An Appendix. | [Quotations] London: | Printed by T. Bensley; | For B. White And Son, at Horace's Head, Fleet Street. | M,DCC,LXXXIX.
"B. White" was Benjamin, next older brother of Gilbert, and one of the chief publishers of books relating to natural history. His interest in this book, therefore, must have been more than usually great, an assumption justified by its typographical appearance. It may, perhaps, be truly said that, with the possible exceptions of Clarendon's History and Percy's Reliques, it is the only work in our series having special artistic merit.
Thomas Bensley was one of the first English printers to turn his attention to printing as a fine art; and he may be reckoned, with Bulmer, chief among the reformers of the art. As Dibdin says, in the Bibliographical Decameron, he "completed the establishment of a self working press, which prints on both sides of the sheet by one and the same operation—and throws off 900 copies in an hour! This really seems magical. It is certainly without precedent." It was, no doubt, with intent that Benjamin White gave the printing of this book into such hands, and something of the sumptuousness which afterward in Macklin's Bible and Hume's History of England made Bensley famous may be seen in this work.