The Works. Thackeray, William Makepeace.

First collected edition. This set is supplemented with Volumes XXIII and XXIV, which were issued in 1886, 17 years after the initial 22 volumes. These volumes include Thackeray's miscellaneous essays, reviews, and contributions to Punch. The edition is pleasingly illustrated with numerous plates and vignettes, many after drawings by Thackeray himself. Modern editions seldom reproduce the illustrations in full and "the reader is deprived thereby not only of much amusement but also of important clues to the meaning of the stories" (Ray, p. 75). Gordon N. Ray, The Illustrator and the Book in England from 1790 to 1914, 1992. 24 volumes, octavo (205 x 132 mm). Contemporary purple half calf by Henry Young and Sons, Liverpool, spine with raised bands, elaborately tooled in compartments, double blue morocco labels, marbled sides and endpapers, top edges gilt. With 22 engraved frontispieces (one folding in vol. XVII), engraved plates and illustrations in text by Thackeray, Richard Doyle, George Du Maurier, and Frederick Walker; oval portraits printed in red in vol. XIX. Bindings bright, spines sunned, occasional surface abrasions to boards and leather, scattered foxing to contents, damp stain to edges of opening leaves of vol. II. A very good set.