Books and Manuscripts

Oxford: Printed at the Theater, for Sam. Smith and Benj. Walford, 1698. First edition. Atlas folio (25 1/8 x approx. 14 in.; 638 x 356 mm). Illustrated with a mezzotint frontispiece portrait of Cowper by John Smith after John Closterman (trimmed to image and mounted); engraved allegorical title-page (without the English title pasted on cartouche as often found); engraved title-page with large vignette; 114 engraved plates (two folding), including numbers 1-105 attributed to Abraham Bloteling after Gerard de Lairesse, and the final nine by Michiel van der Gucht after Henry Cook; woodcut initials and tail-pieces. Bound to style in full red calf, brown calf spine label, decorated in blind and in gilt; small slip tipped-in at front hinge (likely preserved from old endpaper), with manuscript: "Thomas James Morris to his friend and schoolfellow William Wills Wilde June 12th 1838". Prelims, frontispiece, allegorical title-page, plates 1, 2, 9, and 10, as well letterpress for final plate, and index all likely supplied; all plates and text leaves on modern or old stubs; scattered repairs and wear along edges of prelims; repaired closed tear in lower fore-edge of plate I; plate 10 worn and repaired along folds; bottom edge of plate 23 reinforced with Japanese tissue; top corner of final plate repaired; scattered wear and repairs along text and plate edges (especially to final leaves); light to moderate foxing and toning to plates, some light offsetting from same onto text; some plate fore-edges trimmed close to or at plate mark. Norman 529; ESTC R10024; Heirs of Hippocrates 723.9; Wing C-6698

First edition of the finest 17th-century English work on human anatomy. "Cowper obtained 300 impressions of the plates to Bidloo's Anatomia humani corporis and republished them under his own name with an expanded text, which included an 'Introduction explaining the animal oeconomy', and an index. Cowper also added nine separately numbered plates in an 'Appendix, representing the external muscles and divers parts of human bodies...', and pasted his title and his own name as author on a cancel slip over impressions of Bidloo's original engraved title. Bidloo resented Cowper's appropriation of his plates and attacked Cowper in his Guliemus Cowper, criminis literanii citatus (1700)" (Norman).