SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDIES 1910/20s Antiquarian ILLUSTRATED Book Collins' Pocket Ed

c1910s-1920s SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDIES By William Shakespeare Antiquarian Hardback ILLUSTRATED Book. This includes Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet. 

Part of the Collins’ Illustrated Pocket Classics series, number 189. 

Published by Collins’ Clear-Type Press. Printed in Great Britain. 

With 22 Illustrated plates/photograph plates, including double page plates and a frontispiece. There is also an illustrated title page by Malcolm Patterson. They are all present and accounted for. It has burgundy pastedowns and endpapers and Shakespeare’s coat of arms embossed on the front board, “Non Sanz Droict”.  

It is an overall neat and clean copy. 

This is undated, but I understand that this is 189 in the series. In 1903 William Collins launched the Collins’ Illustrated Pocket Novels. These were altered not long after to be known as Collins’ Illustrated Pocket Classics. By 1908 there were 100 titles, and by the 1920s the number had reached more than 300, and so this book must date to somewhere in between. The decorative short gilt stamp on the spine, together with gilt lettering, as well as the elaborate and ornate design on the title page are indicative of one of the books in this series, probably between 1918 and the late 1920s.  

It is bound in the publisher’s original dark red cloth, over boards. The cover is intact, robust, and in a good state for its age. However, there is a little wear, which includes very soft bumping to the corners, light wear at the edges, very small rips in the cloth at the top and bottom of the spine, and only very small marks. Please see the photographs provided for further reference. 

Inside, the pages are thin in consistency. They are lightly tanned, but this is consistent for a book of this age. There is darker tanning on pages 58 and 59 and there is a very small patch of rubbing on page 23, which does not affect the text (see photos). The pages are in an overall neat and clean state for age, and predominantly uncreased. There are only the very occasional small or light mark and only light or small creases on a few pages. There are no rips to the pages. On the half title page there is a small amount of pen, but there is no further pen and pencil written inside this book. The pages are mostly tightly bound, but there are very light cracks in the gutter to the side of the front flyleaf (see photo) and to the side of page 526 (the last page of text, again with photo provided). These are minimal and the pages are all secure. There are no missing pages. All 526 pages are present. Please study the photos carefully as to the condition of this book, as they do form part of the description. 

This measures approximately 15.6 cm by 10.4 cm and 2.1 cm wide. It weighs approximately 266 grams. 

Thank you so much for looking.