Ladies' Old-Fashioned Shoes. With eleven illustrations from originals in his collection. [Bound with:] Supplement to Old-Fashioned Shoes.

Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1885. FIRST EDITION, INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR, oblong folio, pp. [viii], [22], 9, [1] + 11 colour lithograph plates; [vi], [12], 10 + 4 colour lithograph plates & 2 black and white plates. Black and white illustrations within pagination, some plates printed with gold or silver inks. Original grey paper boards backed in red roan, boards bordered with black rules, central crest and corner shoe illustrations printed in black, edges sprinkled red. Some very faint marks. Binding somewhat rubbed and worn, some scrapes to leather. Ink inscription ‘To Mr George Waterston from Thomas W. Greig’ dated October 12, 1885 to initial blank. The scarce first book of antiquarian shoe collector Thomas Watson Greig of Glencarse (1837-1912), with the intention ‘to preserve in an intelligible form what is fast crumbling into dust... as well as to to show the variety of shapes and the excellence of the workmanship and design used by our ancestors’ (Preface), based on the the earlier part of his own collection. This copy was presented by the author to George Waterston, the lithograph printer responsible for this and his later work covering more modern historical shoes, ‘Ladies’ Dress Shoes of the Nineteenth Century’. Greig’s own copy has annotations revealing that only 250 copies were printed, of which he presented 62, though many of these will have been dissected for the attractive plates, now much more often found in framed in galleries than still present in the original form. This copy is relatively well-preserved in the publisher’s binding, but its visible history seems contradictory: the initial blank (the paper of which matches neither the preceding flyleaves nor the following printed leaves) is inscribed in the year of original publication even though it is bound with the separately-published supplement of 1889. Greig did annotate his own copy towards a planned (but never realised) second edition incorporating the supplement, so may have held back presentation copies from binding in anticipation of its appearance, but there are also recorded presentation copies bound without the supplement with inscriptions dated as late as 1917.