Gulliver’s Travels : 2 Vols. In Their Original Bindings

A Two Volume Set. The First UK printing of this illustrated edition published by The Cresset Press in 1930. 2 volumes, folio in half-sheets. Original publisher's bindings by Wood, London which have undergone NO restoration or colouring. The BOOKS are in Very Good++ condition. Morocco, raised bands to spines forming compartments, gilt-lettered direct, vellum sides, top edges gilt, others untrimmed. Sunning to the spines and with a little rubbing to the edges, spines and folds in places. Light marginal toning to the endpapers from the turn-ins with some faint offsetting from a few engravings. No inscriptions. Hand-coloured frontispiece and illustrations to each volume, 10 plates, vignette portrait of Jonathan Swift to title pages, 5 maps, head- and tailpieces, all engraved after the designs of Rex Whistler. First Cresset Press edition. Number '190' of 195 copies on handmade paper; there were also 10 copies on vellum. The short-lived Cresset Press, co-founded by John Eldred Howard in 1927 and run by Dennis Cohen and A. I. Meyers until 1931, produced fine editions of the classics and of Continental literature. Gulliver's Travels is one of the Press's finest books. The illustrative style of Rex Whistler, which the experimentalism of the 1920s, found its inspiration in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and so was well matched to Swift's classic. In this book Whistler employed his favourite device of setting most of the illustrations within a highly decorative rococo marginal frame. Housed in a custom solander box. A superb set and extremely scarce in their original bindings. A masterpiece of book design. More images available on request. Ashton Rare Books welcomes direct contact.