4to [25.0 x 17.4 cm], v. pp, (1) p. blank verso, 222 pp, (1) integral blank with manuscript tally from sale, with (1) unnumbered leaf tipped in at p. 164. Half bound in contemporary green morocco and green shagreen, raised bands, spine gold tooled, marbled endpapers, top edge gilt. Minor rubbing and edge wear to spine and boards, shelf-mark label on spine. Ruled in purple and annotated throughout with names of purchasers and prices realized, further annotations on front flyleaf and occasionally in the text, shelf mark on verso of first leaf, well preserved throughout.

Auction catalogue of the library and art collection of the English author George Daniel (1789-1864) – sold over ten days in 1864 at Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge in London – here in a copy fully annotated with names of purchasers and prices realized. Daniel’s library was especially rich in Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, including Shakespeariana. The sale was noted for two lots in particular, the First Folio (lot 1416) purchased by Baroness Angela Georgina Burdett-Coutts (1814-1906) for £716 2s, a record at the time, and the collection of 70 ‘Black Letter Ballads’ published between 1559 and 1597, bought by the merchant and prominent bibliophile Henry Huth (1815-78) for £750. The Burdett-Coutts First Folio was later purchased by Henry Folger through the bookseller Rosenbach in 1922 for £8600 and is now in the Folger Shakespeare Library, while Huth published the ballads in 1867 for the Philobiblion Society (today they are housed at the British Library).

A noted habitué of the theater, Daniel cultivated friendships with the actors John Kemble and David Garrick. He published miscellaneous works in verse and in prose. “Daniel had been making a reputation as a collector of Elizabethan books and of theatrical curiosities. About 1830 he had moved to 18 Canonbury Square, and the house was soon crowded with very valuable rarities. He secured copies of the first four folio editions of Shakespeare’s works, and of very many of the quarto editions of separate plays. His collection of black-letter ballads was especially notable, and he issued in 1856 twenty-five copies of ‘An Elizabethan Garland, being a Descriptive Catalogue of seventy Black-letter Ballads printed between 1559 and 1597.’ Daniel exhibited great adroitness in purchasing these and seventy-nine other ballads of a Mr. Fitch, postmaster of Ipswich, for 60l.: he sold the seventy-nine to a bookseller acting for Mr. Heber for 70l. At the sale of his library, those retained by Daniel fetched 750l. On 22 Aug. 1835 he bought at Charles Mathews’s sale, for forty-seven guineas, the cassolette, or carved casket made out of the mulberry-tree of Shakespeare’s garden, and presented to Garrick with the freedom of the borough of Stratford-on-Avon in 1769. Daniel was very proud of this relic, and wrote a description of it, which was copiously illustrated, for C. J. Smith’s ‘Literary Curiosities’ in 1840, together with a sketch of Garrick’s theatrical career, entitled ‘Garrick in the Green-room.’ Garrick’s cane was also his property, together with a rich collection of theatrical prints, a small number of water-colours by David Cox, Stansfield, Wilkie, and others. Daniel died suddenly of apoplexy, at his son’s house at Stoke Newington, on 30 March 1864. By his will Garrick’s cassolette passed to the British Museum, and is now on exhibition there. The rest of his literary collection was sold by auction on 20 July 1864 and the nine following days [2278 lots in total], and realised 15,865l. 2s.” (DNB).

* S. Lee, “Daniel, George,” Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 14.

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