Description
Autograph Letter Signed, rebuking his correspondent, evidently an engraver, for having failed to respect their agreement about the production of the Hincks plates. 3 pp. 5 x 4 inches, in good condition, small piece of paper adhering where formerly mounted. Paternoster Row, 14 November 1866. Uncommon. John Van Voorst (1804–1898), natural history publisher. Van Voorst commenced publishing at 3 (afterwards 1) Paternoster Row, London, in 1833. His list of titles began with illustrated reprints, the earliest notable being Gray’s Elegy in a Country Church-Yard and Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield, before moving on to the specialized sphere of natural history works. Among his illustrators were John Constable, William Mulready, Richard Westall, and Edwin Landseer, all of the Royal Academy, together with Copley Fielding, George Cattermole, W. Dickes, John Thompson, Sam Williams, Stothard, and DeWint. Van Voorst issued works in regular parts or classified and sold in sets, as in the sixty-two volumes of The Natural History of the British Islands; in later years he innovatively experimented with the use of photographs mounted on the page, as in Courtauld’s Ferns of the British Isles.