Series Containing Forty-Four Engravings In Colours of Fashionable Furniture, A; de ACKERMANN, Rudolph

London: Published by R. Ackermann, 1823. The Extremely Scarce Second Series

[ACKERMANN, Rudolph]. A Series Containing Forty-Four Engravings In Colours of Fashionable Furniture. London: R. Ackermann, 1823.

First edition. Small quarto. [2], 52, 4, [as adverts.] pp. Forty-four hand-colored line, stipple or aquatint engraved plates, watermarked 1821-22, each printed with caption-title, imprinted "Ackermann's Repository of Arts" and dated to a month in 1822.

Publisher's quarter crimson roan over drab boards, original printed pale green paper title label ("Upholsterer's and Cabinet-Maker's Repository"), gilt rules to spine. Roan and boards a little worn at extremities, internally clean. An remarkable copy of a very rare Ackermann title. Housed in an early twentieth-century red cloth clamshell case.

No copies have appeared at auction since ABPC began indexing results in 1923. OCLC records only six copies in institutional holdings worldwide.

A selection of plates and notes taken from Ackermann's Repository of Arts, and second in a series: Abbey records an Ackermann title, Upholsterer's and Cabinet-Maker's Repository, c. 1830, with seventy-six plates dated 1809-1815 but watermarked 1827-30. "Upholsterer's and Cabinet-Maker's Repository" appears on the title-label to the volume under notice but not the title-page. In the Preface to this copy it is written, "The Publisher... trusts with confidence that they will prove equally interesting with the First Series, containing seventy-six Designs, which has sometime been before the pubic." Thus the Preface to this, the Second Series, belies Abbey who does not note this Second Series and mis-dates the First Series.

Cf. Abbey, Life, 1. Not in Tooley, Hardie, or Prideaux.