This is a seventeen volume set of The Works of Lord Byron: With His Letters And Journals, And His Life, By Thomas Moore, Esq.; the first twelve volumes were published in London by John Murray in 1832, volumes 13 and 14 were published by John Murray in 1833, and the last three volumes were published as a set by John Murray in 1833 and were all about Don Juan. The books are 3/4 bound, with four raised bands, five compartments with gilt lettering or gilt devices on the spine, marbled boards and marbled endpapers with the bookplate of Frank L. Hadley on the front paste-downs, in fine bindings by Root & Son, they all have illustrated frontispieces followed by a vignette title page, then the regular title page, and some have Advertisements and Contents pages after that, two have an Appendix (volumes 9 and 17), and the last volume has an Index that seems to cover all seventeen volumes. (The Index runs from 249 to page 304.) Vol. 9 also has a fold-out facsimile copy of a letter written by Byron before the text in that volume, all the top elders are gilt, and they all have blue ribbon markers to shown you where you were reading in a particular book. Lord Byron (1788 - 1824) was an English poet and peer, and a leading figure of the Romantic movement. Thomas Moore (1779 - 1852) was an Irish writer and poet who had a lasting friendship with Byron; in 1818, Moore saw Byron for the last time and Byron entrusted him with a manuscript for his memoirs, and, as Byron's literary executor, Moore promised to have it published after Byron's death. In 1821, with Byron's blessing, Moore sold the manuscript to the publisher, John Murray. Yet there was controversy about the manuscript: after Byron's death in 1824, Moore battled with Byron's friends and relatives over the fate of the memoirs - Murray felt the material contained coarse, vulgar material that was unfit for publication, so Moore was forced to let the memoirs be destroyed. In Moore's presence, the family solicitors tore up all extant copies of the manuscript and burned them in Murray's fireplace; but in the end, Moore made amends by doing an immense amount of research and producing this voluminous biography that helped to establish and guard his friend's legacy. Frank L. Hadley may well have been an oil baron because his bookplate features a stack of books with an oil lamp, an eagle, a light shining on a book, and a bunch of oil wells smack dab in the middle of the bookplate. The books measure 6 3/4 x 4 3/6 in. wide, the bindings are tight and the pages and text are clean, with some shadows and faint brown spots on some of the frontispieces and vignette title pages, and on some of the blank endpapers at the front and at the rear, but they don't affect the text at all, from what we can see, and the spines are very bright. Volume 17 has light rubbing on the backside. There are some white spots on some of the covers - they look like paper loss - and they range from no white spots at all to small and light white spots to somewhat larger ones, and then to a few that are more noticeable, and still the set is very attractive overall, and a chance to get a look at Byron's life up close. #53 #1579