Oliver Wendell Holmes : Three-Volume Uniform Set in Slipcase
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table The Poet at the Breakfast-table The Professor at the Breakfast-Table
Published by Walter Scott, London, undated, circa 1885. Three uniform volumes from 'The Scott Library' series in a custom-made slipcase. Beautiful gilt cloth bindings with decorative paper boards, decorative endpapers, gilt to all page edges. CONDITION A very good clean set in fine condition. No damage, writing, foxing, stains etc. Pages very clean and all bindings sound. Overall a very good set.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table(1858) is a collection of essays written by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. The essays were originally published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1857 and 1858 before being collected in book form. The author had written two essays with the same name which were published in the earlier The New-England Magazine in November 1831 and February 1832, which are alluded to in a mention of an "interruption" at the start of the first essay.
In addition to Autocrat, there are two further volumes in the series drawing on later essays along similar themes. The first sequel,The Professor at the Breakfast-Table, was published in 1859. Its second sequel,The Poet at the Breakfast-Table, was published much later in 1872. The original "Autocrat" of the first series dies and is replaced by a physician who trained in Paris who is also a faculty member of a well-known medical school in the sequel. Holmes also included a character nicknamed "Little Boston", the last surviving member of a well-established Massachusetts family that was known to be a satirical version of Holmes himself. The final instalment, The Poet at the Breakfast Table, focuses on a character referred to as The Master, who advocates modern scientific ideas. The fifteen-year gap between the original Breakfast-Table book and its final instalment allowed a very different tone which was more mellow and nostalgic than its predecessors. Holmes wrote of it: "As people grow older ... they come at length to live so much in memory that they often think with a kind of pleasure of losing their dearest possessions. Nothing can be so perfect while we possess it as it will seem when remembered".
