.An excellent, very wide-margined copy, elegantly bound, of the first edition of this lavishly illustrated history of Cambridge University, complete with 96 hand-coloured aquatints of colleges and their founders. The fine aquatints, with their somewhat old-world flavour, are well suited to reproduce the spirit and to recall the antique associations of the old quads and courts (Prideaux). .Born in Saxony, Rudolph Ackermann emigrated to London in the 1780s, where he started traded in prints and eventually opened a business in the Strand dealing in books, prints, medallions and artists materials. He was particularly influential in furthering lithographic illustration in Britain , and published many important, elegantly illustrated topographical books (Archer, p.14). Each section includes a history of the college foundation as well as lists of its most important alumni and benefactors to the early C19, with detailed biographies including interesting bibliographic information, such as the nature and fate of the mss production and personal collection of the C17 antiquary Thomas Baker, fellow of St John s, or the mention of the specimen of a intended edition of Aeschylus by Anthony Askew, from Emanuel, published in Leiden in the 1770s, but never eventually completed. .Christopher Turnor (1809-86) was a Tory MP, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. Stoke Rochford Hall was rebuilt in Jacobean style by William Burn in 1839. HRH Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester (1900-74) was younger brother of Edward VIII and George VI, and a great bibliophile. He was at Trinity in 1919, but not allowed to live in college by his father, for fear of his association with bad company . . .The 1812 watermark and the later state of pl.73 (cf. Abbey) confirm this as the second issue.
