1875 Admiral Codrington Memoir Harrow School Prize Binding Full Calf Leather

About this book

Memoir of the Life of Admiral Sir Edward Codrington

With Selections from His Public and Private Correspondence

Edited and abridged by his daughter, Lady Jane Bourchier

Longmans, Green, and Co., London, 1875

Contemporary full calf Harrow School prize binding

No ISBN

Admiral Sir Edward Codrington served during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, commanded HMS Orion at the Battle of Trafalgar, and later led the allied fleet at the Battle of Navarino. This 1875 volume was edited by his daughter from the larger two-volume work published in 1873.

This copy was bound as a Harrow School mathematics prize. The full calf binding has gilt borders, Harrow crossed-arrow corner tools, gilt spine decoration, raised bands, and marbled endpapers. The prize plate reads “In Literis Mathematicis” and names Henry Montagu Butler as Headmaster of Harrow in 1875.

The plate proves Harrow School prize provenance. It does not name the student who received the book and does not show that Butler personally owned it.

The Harrow connection is especially fitting because Codrington himself attended Harrow before entering the Royal Navy in 1783.

Best fit for collectors of Royal Navy history, Trafalgar, the Napoleonic Wars, Admiral Nelson’s captains, British school prize bindings, Harrow School, and decorative Victorian leather books.

Major hook: An original 1875 naval memoir in a gilt Harrow School mathematics prize binding from Henry Montagu Butler’s time as headmaster.