Memoirs of The First Forty-Five Years of the Life of James Lackington

London: Printed for and sold by the Author.. n.d. [1791].

First edition. 8vo. 220x140mm. pp.Xxxii, 343. Uncut in the original marbled paper covered boards. Protected by a brown buckram wrapper with a red morocco label lettered in gilt and housed in a brown slipcase. A lovely copy – as authentic a relic of the eighteenth-century book trade as one could wish to find - of the epistolary memoirs of the first recognisably modern bookseller. A man to whom all should be eternally grateful whether we are (to use Lackington's classification) "Worthy Patrons", "Respectable Booksellers" or "those sordid and malevolent Booksellers…in wretched huts of dark and grovelling obscurity". Take your pick…but be aware that this note was written in a shed tucked deep in the Norfolk woods.