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Author(s): Rogers, W Harry

Illustrator(s): Rogers, W Harry; Swain, Joseph (engraver)

First edition. [xii], 224pp. Illustrated frontispiece, vignette on red and black title page, illustrated and ornamented throughout. Bound in full brown leather decorated with gilt and blind tooling, gilt lettering front and spine, five panels/four raised bands to spine., all edges sprayed red. Bevelled boards. Brown endpapers. Brown satin marker bound in. Printed in black with red page decorations, page borders and accents throughout. Many double page spreads with Rogers' title and evocative passage (or two) on the left and his visual representations opposite. 8vo. Boards are moderately worn, most markedly at edges, a few light scratch marks, rubbed on corners and spine ends, spine faded, upper text block edge darkened and dust marked. Front hinge broken, releasing backstrip and front panel, else internally neat, clean, bright and tight throughout. William Harry Rogers was among the finest artist-designers of the mid-Victorian era , peer of the likes of Augustus Pugin and Owen Jones. He won several medals at the 1851 Great Exhibition and he subsequently specialised in book design and augmentation, becoming the supreme book designer of the 1850s and 1860s. Gregory Jones, in his book on William Harry Rogers, says of Spiritual Conceits, it is 'WHR's most complete work in book form, the only one in which he had a free hand in devising the striking whole-page plates...the book provides the most extensive and striking development of WHR's exploration of the emblem...Spiritual Conceits has no obvious peer in the High Victorian period' [Jones, Gregory, William Harry Rogers: Victorian Book Designer and Star of the Great Exhibition, p. 141]. Engravings by Joseph Swain and printed by Charles Whittingham at the Chiswick Press. A second edition of Spiritual Conceits was issued in 1870 under the title Emblems of Christian Life. An important, scarce work.

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