ACKERMANN, Rudolph (1764-1834, publisher)

The Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions, and Politics

London: R. Ackermann, 1809-1828. 8vo. (9 3/8 x 5 3/4 inches). 3 series in 40 volumes. 1,491 plates, including engravings, lithographs, aquatints and woodcuts, the large majority contemporary hand-coloured, and 65 woodcuts containing 2 or more mounted fabric or paper swatches.

Later red half morocco, gilt edges.

Provenance: Gother Mann (1747-1830), army officer and military engineer

First edition of Ackermann’s influential, authoritative publication on taste and fashion: an extraordinarily ambitious project providing a contemporary pictorial record of social life in early nineteenth-century Europe, and one of Britain’s earliest publications to use lithography

Issued in parts, each volume is devoted to series that include ladie's fashion, new developments in furniture designs or architecture, views of London emporiums and English country houses, foreign views of cities and countries, and, in the early issues, allegorical woodcuts with actual samples of British-made textiles and papers used in fashion and decoration. As a result of having been preserved in book form, these samples remain as fresh and unfaded as when they were first produced. The first series (until 1815) is an extraordinary document of the Napoleonic wars and French cultural influence on fashion and style in Regency England. The Repository also depicts for the first time in a magazine for the general public technological advances such as gas lamps, steamboats, and an early version of a bicycle. The illustrations provided Ackermann with much material which he republished in various subsequent works. John Buonarotti Papworth's Select views of London (1816), Rural residences (1818), and Picturesque tour from Geneva to Milan (1820), for example, all appeared for the first time in the Repository.

Abbey Life 212; Tooley pp.25-47; Bobins IV, 1316; Colas 2541.

Item #41189

Price: $32,000.00