Bishop Jade Collection: Philadelphia Rare Books

Philadelphia Rare Books & Manuscripts Company - Early Printed Books, Substantive Manuscripts, U.S. and Latin Americana, Mexico & New World Languages, Hispanica, Histories & the History of Ideas, Travels, Cookery, Law, Religion, & Bibles (All Antiquarian)

The Metropolitan Museum's
Bishop Jade Collection

— Very Rare in Commerce —

To view two more pictures establishing scale —
click here.

Art Scholarship Luxuriously Presented Bishop, Heber Reginald. The Bishop Collection. Investigations and studies in Jade. New York: Privately printed by The DeVinne Press, 1906. Folio extra (63 cm; 25 in. tall). 2 vols.
[SOLD]

Heber R. Bishop (1840–1902) was a New York aristocrat who, among other things, was a hunting buddy of Teddy Roosevelt's. He was also the major American collector of Asian jade during his lifetime. His collection went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and forms the amazing foundation upon which all its later acquisitions are built.

Bishop's executors had the text designed and printed, and the illustrations reproduced, by The DeVinne Press, and ordered bindings by Stikeman.

Illustrations: The two large heavy volumes offer hundreds of in-text illustrations. Additionally tendered are a portrait of Bishop and scores of plates representing painstaking work by numerous artists in several media, including 13 original watercolor drawings by Li Shih-ch'uan on 6 plates, 36 colored lithographs, 31 copperplate engravings, and 17 woodcuts.

Binding: Full red, crushed morocco by Stikeman; wide turn-ins, gilt inner dentelles and board edges, moiré silk endpapers. Top edge gilt and other edges uncut.

This gigantic set was ALWAYS very rare in commerce.

As our top picture shows — these books, lying on their backs, take an entire broad shelf of their own, and in imagining scale it should be noted that the books on the shelf above are GOOD-sized quartos.

Very good condition. Some abrading, refurbished.

A splendid presence — and studyable, too;
not just splendid.

This set of books "stars" in PRB&M's Adventure
in Bookselling No. 5 — click here.

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