Cox’s A General History of Greece 1876. This book is titled “A General History Of Greece From The Earliest Period To The Death Of Alexander The Great, With A Sketch Of The Subsequent History To the Present Time”, written by George M. Cox and published in London by Longmans, Green in 1876 and printed in London by Spottiswoode and Co. at New-Street Square and Parliament Street, and the book is a first edition, according to WorldCat. (It is also a first edition because it just has a single date on the title page.) The book has five raised bands, six-gilt-ruled compartments with a black label, gilt lettering and gilt decorations on the spine, polished calf covers with double gilt-fillet borders, marbled endpapers, a pencilled inscription of “L. M. Robinson” on the first blank endpaper, a page with the printer’s information, a fold-out colored map of “Greek & Phenician Settlements” by Edwd Weller done by Longmans, then the title page, a four-page Preface, which includes a note about the spelling of Greek names, the Contents pages run from ix to xxxi, with an Erratum note at the bottom of page xxxi, 671 pages of text, with footnotes at the bottom of some of the pages, 12 colored maps, including the fold-out frontis, a chronological table that runs to page 693, a sixteen-page Index that ends at page 709, and all the edges are marbled. George W. Cox (1827 - 1902) was a British historian known for writing several books about ancient Greece and the statesmen of ancient Greece. The titles include the History of Greece (1874), The Greeks and the Persians (1876), The Athenian Empire (1876), Lives of Greek Statesmen, Solon–Theistokles (1885), and Lives of Greek Statesmen, Ephialtes–Hermokrates (1886), so George was a busy little camper in the 1870’s and 1880’s, and he wrote “The Tales From Greek Mythology” in 1863, a book about Greek myths for children. He also wrote about the Crusades and the establishment of British India, and the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé has translated some of his works under the title of Les Dieux Antiques. He was born at Benares, a city on the Ganges River in northern India, and attended preparatory school in Bath, was a good soccer player, and was elected scholar of Trinity College at Oxford. He was ordained a minster in 1850, but resigned due to bad health, and he was always affiliated with the church for the next thirty years or so. His liberal views of Scripture got him in trouble with the church hierarchy, and when he was chosen as Bishop of Natal, the Archbishop refused to consecrate his appointment, and at least he had his writing and history background to fall back on. The book is 8vo. and measures 7 1/2 x 5 1/4 in. wide, with a tight binding and clean pages and text, and the maps are very clean too. There are faint brown spots on the title page and a few pages in the chapter about Athens, but the spots are small and just here and there; the gilt is faded a bit, there’s rubbing on the spine and along the edges of the boards, a dark mark on the gilt decoration at the bottom of the spine, wear at the tips and a couple of tips are turned in, light scratches on the covers, the frontis map has creases and wear along the outer edge and is still very clean. There are no copies offered for sale online at the rare book website we use, just modern reprints, the modern reprints run anywhere from $40 to $75, so the book turns out to be a rare first edition about Greek history and figures like Alexander the Great, who helped to mold Greece and shaped the future of Greece as a nation state. (See Bill McBride’s A Pocket Guide to the Identification of First Editions.) #200 #1566