8vo. [2], x, 392pp. Contemporary green half-calf, tooled in gilt and blind, marbled boards. Lightly rubbed, spine dulled. Very occasional damp-staining to head of text-block, small marginal holes to leaves O1 and 3B3. William St Clair's copy, with his distinctive pencilled ownership inscription to FEP.

The first edition of bookseller William Goodhugh's (1798/9-1842) manual on library formation. In addition to providing notes on those books which properly ought to find a place in any respectable collection, Goodhugh treats, inter alia, on the 'Booksellers of Little Britain', the 'Loss of Books in the Fire at London', the 'Copyright of Plays', and 'Shakesperiana'. The Gentleman's Magazine (October, 1827, p.330) were ambivalent in their review: 'The denomination "Gentleman's Library," must properly be considered as here used in contrast to a Lady's library, i.e. a library consisting of trash. We wish, however, that Mr. Goodhugh had avoided the term altogether, for it bears the construction of being a catalogue of works fitted for gentlemen in particular, limiting the term to men of independent fortune...In every class numerous writers of merit are omitted, and when the gentleman had collected Mr Goodhugh's whole "List of Books," at the moderate cost of about forty or fifty thousand pounds, he would find that he had ten or twenty thousand pounds more to sacrifice, in order to include the ill-used and insulted omittees.'

William St Clair (1937-2021), British scholar and senior civil servant, notable as the author of The Godwins and the Shelleys, The Biography of a Family (1989) and The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (2004).