This book is titled "The Bab Ballads With Which Are Included Songs Of A Savoyard", by W. S. Gilbert, with 350 illustrations by the author, published in London by Macmillan in 1953. The book was originally published in 1868 and this is a reprint of the Sixth edition from 1904, in a fine binding by Bayntun Riviere. The Bab Ballads is a collection of light verse by W. S. Gilbert, illustrated with his own comic drawings. Gilbert (1836-1911) was an English dramatist, poet, and illustrator who was part of the musical team of Gilbert and Sullivan that wrote fourteen comic operas between 1871 and 1896, including H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado. Gilbert was born in London and began writing illustrated stories, poems, and articles in 1861 to supplement his income, and some of these writings became the basis for this book. The poems took their name from Gilbert's childhood nickname, "Bab", which was short for "baby", he didn't start signing his drawings "Bab" until 1866, and he did not start calling the poems "Bab Ballads" until the first collected edition was published in 1869. He had a topsy-turvy style of writing, in which the humor was derived by setting up a ridiculous premise and working out its logical consequences, no matter how absurd it was. Gilbert wrote most of the "ballads" and first published a collection of them in book form before he became famous for his musical collaboration with Arthur Sullivan. The Bab Ballads became famous on their own, as well as being a source for plots and characters and songs that Gilbert recycled in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas. They were read aloud at private dinner-parties, at public banquets, even in the House of Lords, some have been recorded, and the book was so popular it went through several publishings. The book came about because Gilbert wrote articles and poems for "Fun" for ten years, starting in 1861; he was also the drama critic for the magazine. Some of his early work for the journal remain unidentified because many pieces were unsigned. The earliest pieces that Gilbert considered worthy to be collected for The Bab Ballads started to appear in 1865, and then much more steadily from 1866 to 1869. His output of Bab Ballads started to fall off considerably as he became more successful in the opera world. The last poem that Gilbert himself considered to be a Bab Ballad, "Old Paul and Old Tim," appeared in "Fun" in 1871, and in the remaining years of his life he made only a handful of contributions to periodicals, but the first edition was so popular he put out "Bab Ballads - Much Sound and Little Sense", "More Bab Ballads" appeared in 1872, and "Fifty Bab Ballads" came out in 1876. The book has five raised bands, six gilt-ruled compartments with black labels, gilt lettering and gilt decorations on the spine, double gilt-fillet borders and two comic figures in gilt on the front cover, marbled endpapers with wide gilt dentelles on the front paste-down, "Bound by Bayntun Riviere, Bath, England" stamped at the top of the first blank endpaper, the illustrated title page, a Note from the Author, six pages of Contents, 554 pages of text, a six-page Index to First Lines, a four-page Alphabetical Index to Titles, and all the edges are gilt. The book is 8vo. and measures 7 1/4 x 4 7/8 in. wide, with a tight binding and clean pages and text, and clean illustrations as well. There's light rubbing a the heel and along the edges of the spine, a little bit on the gilt borders on the front cover and at the tips, a couple of brown spots on pages 551 and 552 at the rear, and an attractive book of these poems and verses by an operatic genius, in a fine binding by Bayntun Rivière, one of the premier binders of the 1900's. #105 #1641