The Fables of Aesop; With a Life of the Author; and Embellished with one Hundred & twelve Plates

London: John Stockdale, 1793. First Edition. Fine. 2 vol., Large 8vo, 11 x 7 in. (278 x 178 mm); pp. lxv, 189 (misnumbered 891); advertisement, xi, 248; engraved vignettes on title page of each vol. and 110 other plates, one for each fable, by various engravers including Skelton and Barrett, J Chapman, Clarke, J. Smith, some unsigned. Vol. 2 contains the advertisement for the publication of The Fables by John Gay by the same publisher and the same year.
Offset to some pages from engraved plates (tissue guards not present) and very occasional foxing. Handsome later binding in green crushed morocco by F. Bedford (gilt stamped on turn-in of Vol. 1) with gilt fillets on boards, decorative motifs on turn-ins, marbled endpapers, 5 raised bands, spines elaborately gilt and tooled, gilt title, t.e.g., rest uncut.

[Brunet I, 103; Lowndes, I, p. 17; ESTC T84992; Bentley, Blake Books, 460]. A beautiful edition with all 110 engravings by over 30 engravers and two vignette title pages. In his comprehensive study Blake Books, G. E. Bentley mentions that this edition was advertised at the end of the 1793 Stockdale edition of John Gay's Fables, as containing Blake engravings, although Blake did not sign any of the plates.

The elegant binding is by Francis Bedford (1799-1883) who was much beloved by patrons of the English upper class. Many of his choicest productions are imitations of the work of the great French bookbinders of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries Bedford himself considered that an edition of Dante was his chef d'oeuvre. (Dictionary of National Biography, suppl. I, pp. 162-63).