Zeluco: Various Views of Human Nature Taken From Life and Manners Foreign and Domestic by John Moore , First Edition 1789, Two Volumes — VERY RARE
Printed for L. White, P. Byrne, A. Grueber, and W. Jones. Dublin 1789
Volume One: The boards and binding are solid and tight. Slight leather separation from the boards at top of spine. The pages are crisp and clean except for some foxing on the inside boards and first and last blank pages. 288 pages.
Volume Two: The binding and boards are strong and tight. The leather is in very good condition. Some foxing on the inside boards and blank pages. There is some light foxing on the title page. 312 pages.
Overall, the books are in very good condition at 226 years old. Exceptionally RARE copies of a popular work of 18th-century literature.
More info: "One of the most irredeemably evil characters in all of literature.... ZELUCO first appeared in 1789, when it was hailed as an instant classic, as its author, Scottish physician John Moore, was ranked with Richardson, Smollett, and Fielding as one of the finest novelists of the 18th century. Influential on such writers as Burns and Byron, and selected by Anna Laetitia Barbauld in 1810 for her series of the best British novels, ZELUCO mysteriously fell out of print and has remained unobtainable since. ZELUCO charts the career of a wicked Sicilian aristocrat who causes death and ruin to all those around him before finally meeting a horrible fate. But ZELUCO is much more than an early Gothic novel featuring a monomaniachal tyrant: it is a rich panorama of life in the late 18th century, dealing with English and European manners and hot topics of the day, such as the abolition of slavery. Readers will be thrilled to discover this surprisingly humorous — and eminently readable — lost masterpiece new edition."
