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A Lecture on Heads [With] Songs Comic and Satyrical, 1788.

Stevens, George Alexander; Heber, Richard

"I Love Fun! Keep It Up!" Stevens, George Alexander [1710-1784]. A Lecture on Heads, Written by George Alexander Stevens, With Additions by Mr. Pilon; As Delivered by Mr. Charles Lee Lewis, At the Theatre-Royal, Covent-Garden, The Royalty-Theatre, Well-Close-Square, And in Various Parts of the Kingdom; Also in the East-Indies. To Which is Added An Essay on Satire. London: Printed, By Assignment from Mr. Lewis, For G. Kearsley, 1788. xii, 78, [6] pp. With a folding copperplate frontispiece and 3 final advertisement leaves. [Bound with] Stevens, George Alexander. Songs, Comic and Satyrical. London, Printed for G. Kearsley, 1788. 12, 172 pp. With 2 small woodcut vignettes. 12mo (6-1/2" x 4"). Contemporary sheep, gilt fillets and lettering piece to spine, gilt tooling to board edges, small ink library stamp of Richard Heber ("Bibliotheca Heberiana") to front endleaf. Light rubbing and faint staining to boards, small gouge to foot of rear board, moderate rubbing and light wear to extremities, spine ends chipped, joints cracked, corners bumped and lightly worn, front hinge cracked between frontis and title page, later continental bookplates (of F. Vanden Clooster and Charles-Louis van Baviere) to front pastedown and front free endpaper. Light toning to interior, light foxing in a few places, including to frontispiece, faint offsetting from frontis to title page of Lecture, slight cracks in text block between pp. 54-55 of Lecture and p. 112-113 of Songs, all signatures secure. An appealing copy of ro interesting titles. $450. * Later editions, issued both together and as separate works. Perhaps the most famous one-man show to emerge from Britain in the seventeenth century, the Lecture on Heads was devised by Stevens, a traveling actor and writer. A series of satirical monologues performed using paper-mache heads, it was first performed in 1764 and officially published in 1765. The monologues cover a wide range of pertinent social topics. The law does not escape Stevens's notice: satirical cases "Daniel against Dishclout" and "Bullum versus Boatum" lampoon the practices of lawyers and their clients, in addition to a discussion recorded in the index as "Lawyer's Wigs, implications of." The Songs, Stevens's other staple performance, first appeared in print in 1772 and were reissued with the 17.

Price: $450.00

Book number 73543