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Oliver Goldsmith : The Good-Natured Man: A Comedy as Performed at the Theatre-Royale, Covent Garden

G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1984

Original half morocco boards with green cloth. Five raised bands in six compartments, tooled gilt lettering on compartments 2 and 4. Title in red and black., Front and bottom edges are uncut. A fine example of this in original decorative binding. , 8vo (250mmx180mm), P. Frontis, Title, blank, illustrations,blank, half title, blank, advertisement,blank, preface (5-7), blank, prologue (9-10), Dramatis Personae (ii), 13-124, Illustrated with 4 color plates.

First Edition, with L1 in first state and L2 in Todd’s state b. 8vo, half title, title and pp. [iv], 74 [1], epilogue, [1] blank, a little waterstained in the upper inside corner, but a good copy in modern olive green morocco gilt, gilt edges.

Williams lists a number of variants between different copies, of which most in this copy conform to his first state, although the specifically warns that this is ‘a book of which there is, so far as one can tell, no real first issue’. Todd sets out, in somewhat difficult prose, the possible states of the last two leaves.
The prologue is by Johnson, in sonorously gloomy mood: ‘Prest by the load of life, the weary mind Surveys the general toil of human kind...’
Williams, Seven XVIIIth century bibliographies pp. 141-5; Scott p. 211; W.B. Todd in Studies in Bibliography (1958) pp. 134-6; Courtney p. 113 (for Johnson); Rothschild 1031.


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