Green cloth binding with gilt title on the spine. Dimensions are one volume.

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For conditions, please view our photographs. A nice clean rare copy from the library gathered by the famous Cambridge Don, computer scientist, food and wine connoisseur, Jack Arnold LANG. The Percy Anecdotes,  a publishing phenomenon, was as a collection of “gobbets” suitable for social small-talk, or what in modern parlance would be a bluffer’s guide to appearing well read. Jack’s copy of two volumes is a rendered down selection. It is a collection of essays on many different topics from the Percy brothers. A verbatim reprint of the original edition. With engraved frontispieces to each volume. Including essays on honour, genius, music, women, and many other topics. Complete in two volumes. In green cloth bindings. Externally, sound, pages are bright, and quite clean, with just the occasional patch of spotting. Overall great books. 

Joseph Clinton Robertson (c.1787–1852), pseudonym Sholto Percy, was a Scottish patent agent, writer and periodical editor. He was a political radical prominent in the early days of the working-class press in London, and in the debates within the Mechanics Institute movement. As a man of letters, Robertson is known for The Percy Anecdotes, 20 vols. London, 1821–3 (subsequent editions 1830, 1868, 1869, and various American editions). The volumes, which came out in forty-four monthly parts, were supposedly written by Sholto and Reuben Percy: Reuben was Thomas Byerley, and Sholto was Robertson. The so-called “Brothers Percy” had met to discuss the work at the Percy coffee-house in Rathbone Place in Fitzrovia, from which the work took its name. Sir Richard Phillips later claimed that the original idea arose from his suggestion, made to John Mayne and Alexander Tilloch, to file the anecdotes which had appeared in The Star newspaper over the years. The Percys compiled a collection of anecdotes, on a similar plan. Their success, which was a publishing phenomenon, was as a collection of “gobbets” suitable for social small-talk, or what in modern parlance would be a bluffer’s guide to appearing well read. Lord Byron called them indispensable.

The two collaborators began a series of Percy Histories, or interesting Memorials of the Capitals of Europe, but this got no further than London, 1823, in 3 vols. Robertson also started in 1828, as Sholto Percy, an abridgment of the Waverley Novels.