Rare letterpress list of a newly planted orchard.

33 varieties of cherry, pear, plum, peach, nectarine & apricot
 
[Gardening] / [Orchard] / [Phillipps, Thomas]. List of Fruit Trees Planted by Sir T. P. at Thirslestaine October 1864. [Cheltenham:] [Middle Hill Press], [1865]. [17.4 x 10.3 cm], 2 pp., [1] f. blank conjoined leaf. Bound in original drab paper-covered boards. Thread loosely, idiosyncratically wrapped around cords, pencil annotations to covers, title in manuscript on spine, minor rubbing and edge wear to boards. Top edge toned.
 
Rare first and only edition of this unusual letterpress list of fruit trees planted by the renowned bibliomaniac Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872) in 1864 at his Thirlestaine House in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, where in 1863 he had moved with his vast library of manuscript and printed material. 
 
Listed are 40 trees in 33 varieties planted at 9 locations around the property. These are: pear (Beurre d’Amanlis, Fondante [Von Moris], Belle Lucrative, Chaumontelle, Grosse Calabash, Easter Beurre, Queen Adelaide), cherry (White Hart, Black Tartarian, Belle de Choisy, Morello, Purple Griotte, Bigarean Gwscourent [?], Tradescants, Black Heart, May Duke, Downton), plum (Diamond, Golden Gage, Green Gage, Hulling’s Superb, Font Hill, Reine Claude Violet, Dauphine, Le Roi, Delicieuse), peach (Noblesse, Walberton Admirable, Buckingham Mignon, Salway), nectarine (Fairchild’s early, Newington, Temple), and apricot (Moorpark).
 
“Sir Thomas was an obsessive maker and printer of lists [including] twenty or so inventories he produced describing his furniture, maps, photographs, paintings, plate, and other objects. A few of these are wonderfully absurd. One can only guess at what drove the baronet to commission printed inventories of his fruit trees, the stuffed birds in his entry-way, and the specimens he kept on hand for the Microscope at Middle Hill; although there is some evidence to suggest that some at least may have been set as tests for prospective printers” (Holzenberg, pp. xxi-xxii).
 
“Phillipps was one of the greatest (and perhaps the most voracious) of all book and manuscript collectors” (Tanselle, “Preface,” in Holzenberg, p. xi), and beginning in 1822 his delightful, often bizarre Middle Hill Press produced hundreds of items of true literary, bibliographic, antiquarian, local-historical, and genealogical importance, all the while mixing letterpress with experimental lithographic, anastatic and photographic techniques. Phillipps also used his press to handle the business needs of the estate (e.g., blank forms), to engage in local squabbles and political disputes, and to print items of all sorts in very small batches for his own amusement or for informal distribution to friends (or enemies) of his choosing. 
 
The List of Fruit Trees was no doubt was printed in very small numbers. The piece is undated, but proof copies at the Grolier Club are dated in manuscript 14 January and 6 February 1865. The item offered here, like others Middle Hill Press pieces was, “stitched into drab terra-cotta colored boards favored by Sir Thomas to such an extent that they have become known as ‘Middle Hill boards’” (Holzenberg, pp. xvii-xviii). It is likely that other Middle Hill pieces were once shared the binding that the List of Fruit Trees now has to itself.
 
OCLC locates examples of List of Fruit Trees at Yale, the Grolier Club, Oxford Bodleian, British Library, and Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.
 
*E. Holzenberg, The Middle Hill Press: A Checklist of the Horblit Collection, p. 134, no. 491.