Alfred Tennyson Queen Mary A Drama 1875 First Edition Red Leather
Alfred Tennyson Queen Mary A Drama 1875 First Edition Red Leather
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Queen Mary by Alfred Tennyson, first edition, published by Henry S. King in London in 1875, bound in full red leather with a richly gilt-tooled spine across five raised bands. Tennyson wrote this as his first drama, a five-act verse play about the doomed reign of Mary I of England, and it arrived to considerable attention — he was Poet Laureate at the height of his celebrity, and the Tudor queens were exactly the kind of subject that gripped the Victorian reading public. Someone named M.S. gave this copy to "St Leonards" on 12 August 1875, just months after publication, and that inscription in a confident Victorian hand tells you something about the household it entered: literate, current, and evidently with a taste for fine bindings.
The binding is sound and the book is structurally solid throughout. The spine is the strongest element: the gilt tooling across all five compartments retains good definition and color, the green title label reads clearly, and the raised bands are firm. The leather at the spine shows light wear at the head and tail but no splitting or loss.
The boards are a different story. Both front and rear covers carry significant surface wear: scratching, scuffing, and some deeper score marks across the leather, particularly on the front board. The leather itself is not cracking, lifting, or deteriorating — it is stable and unbroken — but the surface has taken considerable use over 150 years and it shows. The gilt roll border at the board edges is partially legible; worn in places but present throughout. The joints appear tight with no cracking at the hinges.
Internally the book is clean and complete. The text block is tight, the marbled endpapers and marbled edges are intact with good color, and the period inscription to the title page is clear. Scattered light foxing to the page margins throughout, consistent with age and paper quality. No missing pages, no loose leaves, no annotations beyond the gift inscription.
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