This is the first edition of the statutes of 1529, the 21st year of Henry VIII's reign and the first legislative session of the Reformation Parliament; this volume originating from the library of William Morris, with his posthumous book label to the front pastedown. 1/
The volume was sold in William Morris's sale at Sotheby's in 1898, lot 582, to Ellis booksellers for 2 18s. The reason the book would have appealed to William Morris is immediately obvious on the title page, where the reader is confronted with a woodcut aptly described as.... 2/
.... "an enormous S formed by a grotesque serpentine beast with a man's head protruding from its mouth", a striking example of Tudor book design, and very unusual for a book of statutes. 3/
Early English printing in all its forms appealed to Morris, and he revived the black letter font, as preferred by Tudor printers, in his Kelmscott Press books. 4/
Following Morris's sale, the volume passed through two fine US collections, that of Doris Benz (1907-1984), a scholar of Renaissance literature, and the Ohioan Judge Willis Vickery (1857-1932), a Shakespeare scholar and collector whose library held all 4 Shakespeare folios. 5/
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