London’s theatres and the people who filled them, in John Doran’s essays
Essays on Drury Lane, theatrical life, British personalities and social customs, in a numbered two-volume Boston deluxe edition.
The story
John Doran wrote about the London stage and the people around it, and a number of these essays first appeared in periodicals before they were gathered into a book. The collection was first published in London in 1881; this is a later American edition from Francis A. Niccolls & Co. of Boston, undated but placed between about 1900 and 1913.
Doran treats a theatre as a meeting place for a whole society, so his essays move easily from the stage to the people in and around it and to the habits of their day. Portraits behind tissue guards, decorative title pages and other illustrations put faces to the names.
This set is number 139 of 1,000 copies of the Édition de Luxe, in two volumes of slate-grey cloth with paper labels on the spines, both now badly chipped; the spine ends and corners are frayed and the fore-edges deckled. Each volume has the same ornamental monogram bookplate, whose owner has not yet been identified.
Details
- Date
- c. 1900–1913 (undated Francis A. Niccolls Édition de Luxe; inferred from related editions)
- Publisher
- Francis A. Niccolls & Co., Boston
- Edition
- Édition de Luxe; no. 139 of 1,000 copies
- Binding
- cloth: Matching slate-gray publisher's cloth, paper spine labels, deckled fore edges
- Condition
- Two slate-gray cloth volumes with significant chipping to both paper spine labels, frayed spine ends/corners, light rubbing and aging of paper, deckled edges. Illustrated leaves visible; completeness not fully collated.
- Bookplate
- Decorative intertwined initials or monogram in both volumes, not securely read
