Item #594 A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. With an introductory Discourse Concerning Taste, and Several Other Additions. Edmund Burke.
A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. With an introductory Discourse Concerning Taste, and Several Other Additions.
Very Good Copy Contemporary Philadelphia Binding

A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. With an introductory Discourse Concerning Taste, and Several Other Additions.

Philadelphia: Printed for D. Johnson, Portland by J. Watts, 1806. Item #594

12mo. 180 x 110 mm., [7 x 4 ¼ inches].  [viii], 273 pp.  Portrait frontispiece and title-page vignette.  Bound in contemporary calf, red leather label, gilt spine; joints cracked but sound; paper stock lightly brown with age, some sporadic foxing.  Bookplate of Knox College Library, a gift from Donna Workman.


Second American edition, originally appearing London 1756 and it first appeared in America in 1805.  Burke’s essay of taste and the sublime was very well received and it, along with his Reflections published earlier in the same year, announced his entry into English intellectual circles.  His Inquiry had influence in both France and Germany, and it became one of the hallmark publications of the Romantic movement that peaked at the end of the century.


Shaw and Shoemaker, American Bibliography, 10065.

Price: $325.00

See all items in Art History, Enlightenment, Literature
See all items by