Queen Elizabeth

London, Paris, Edinburgh: Boussod, Valadon & Co, 1896. leather_bound. Full crushed morocco. Near fine. [1] 202 pages. Folio, 32.5 x 24.5 cm. 39 photogravures, 23 full-page inserted plates, and one double-page, all with lettered tissue guards. First edition of the “best short biography of Elizabeth” (Conyers 514) and the first book in the Goupil series with the publisher's bookplate: "The Firms's Book." The author, an English historian had an "irrepressible and often daring humor"; this, "together with his frank distaste for much conventional religious phraseology, was a stumbling block to some pious people" [BRITANNIA VII, 402]. Mandell Creighton was a British historian, Anglican priest and bishop. In Creighton's preface he notes, "The Chief merit of the volume....lies in the attempt to bring together the most remarkable portraits of Elizabeth and her contemporaries, and to put before the readers careful reproduction of artistic sources of information which have hitherto been little known. BMC 6: 543.929. CBEL III, 912. Hand–colored frontispiece portrait of Elizabeth. Bound by Harrison of Pall Mall, double gilt ruled border panels, inner dentelles, marbled endpapers, spine evenly sunned to brown, endpapers toned.