This book is titled "The Sylvan Year. Leaves From The Notebook Of Raoul Dubois", written by Philip Gilbert Hamerton and published by Seeley, Jackson, And Halliday in London in MDCCCLXXXIII [1883]. It's a third edition, with eight etchings, and it was bound by Zaehnsdorf, one of the finest Europeans binders of the 1880's. The first edition was published in 1876 by Seeley, Jackson, and Halliday as well, and had twenty etchings. Philip Gilbert Hamerton (1834 - 1894) was an English artist, art critic and author. He was a keen advocate of contemporary printmaking and most of his writings concern the graphic arts. He was an important theorist of the English Etching Revival, which was the re-emergence of etching as an original form of printmaking from approximately 1850 to 1930. (The revival came to an abrupt end with the stock market crash of 1929.) Hamerton's first literary attempt was an unsuccessful volume of poems, so he turned to landscape painting; he camped out in the Scottish Highlands, where he settled with his wife. Then he discovered he was more suited to art criticism than painting, so he moved to Sens and Autun, where he produced his Painter's Camp in the Highlands. The book has five raised bands six gilt-ruled compartments with gilt lettering and gilt tooling on the spine, textured covers with double gilt-fillet borders, gilt dentelles with paisley patterned endpapers, "Zaehnsdorf" stamped at the bottom of the first blank endpaper, the half-title, a beautiful rustic scene for the frontis illustrated by Hamerton himself, the title page, a List of Illustrations, a two-page Preface, 238 pages of text, followed by a five-page Index, and all the edges are gilt. The book is about nature and follows the happenings outdoors during the months of the year, and the illustrations depict chestnuts, wolves, and the forest, if that gives you an indication of what the book is about. The book measures 7 1/2 x 5 1/8 in. wide, with a tight binding and clean pages. You don't encounter any brown spots until the last blank endpapers of the book, and that's it, there's light rubbing along the edges of the spine and the spine is a bit faded, the gilt edges are like sunlight, and an attractive book for someone who loves nature. #65 #1542