Pulteney, Richard, and Thomas Rackett

Catalogues of the Birds, Shells, and Some of the More Rare Plants of Dorsetshire. London: Printed by and for Nichols, Son and Bentley, 1813

Folio (379 x 🐟241 mm). Text in two columns, engraved portrait, 24 engraved plates on 13 sheets. Contemporary hal🐟f green morocco, cloth-backed grey paper boards. 

First illustrated edition, presentation copy, inscribed by Rackett: "W. Wood Esqre from the rev🌞d Tho. Rackett."

Richard Pulteney received his doctorate in medicine from the University of Edinburgh in 1764, before serving as the personal physician to the Earl of Bath. Following the Earl's death, he resided and practiced in Blandford, Dorset. Besides membership in a host of medical societies, Pulteney was el♌ected a Fellow of the Royal Society, as well as a Fellow of the Linnean Society. Indeed, he was an early promoter of Linnaean taxonomy, and authored the first English biography of Linnaeus in 1781. His cabinet of specimens, noted particularly for its shells, was donated to t꧋he Linnean Society following his death in 1801.

The first edition of 1799 was privately-published by Pulteney with few copies printed. An inscription in an extant copy by the editor of this new edition reveals that copies of the first edition were further destroyed by fire: "The first Impression of Dr. Pulteney's Catalogues was never published, the whol♓e having been destroyed by the fire, at Mr. Nichols's printing office [in 1808]. To this second impression I have ma𝕴de considerable additions from my own observations and from communication by various scientific friends."

Racket♔t's revised edition was the first to be illustrated, containing a portrait of Pulteney, a plate depicting 17 shells titled Melbury Fossils (engraved by J. Cary after Mary Foster), and 23 engraved plates of shells on 12 sheets. The plates numbered I-XXIII are new engravings of those by De Costa in his Historia Naturalis Testaeorum Britanniae, with several additions, depicting over 200 species.

PROVENANCE

✤Henry Collins (bookplate) — James Wason (nameplate)

REFERENCE

BM(NH) IV:1622; Pritzel 7367; Nissen, ZBI 3250