[ Sir Ambrose Heal, furniture designer. ] Autograph volume listing 'Booksellers in Paternoster Row', with his bookplate. With pamphlet by Robert Bagster: 'The Centenary of the First Pocket Reference Bible, Issued by Samuel Bagster 1812'

Neatly bound in 12mo red cloth volume with 'BOOKSELLERS IN PATERNOSTER ROW' in gilt on spine. In good condition, lightly aged. Heal's slight list, in alphabetical order, is neatly written out on 13pp. Underlining his interest in the area to which the volume relates, Heal's elegant and restrained bookplate ('A H | LONDON') features the dome of St Paul's. Bound in at the rear of the volume is Robert Bagster's sixteen-page pamphlet, titled 'The Centenary of the First Pocket Reference Bible | Issued by Samuel Bagster 1812', with drophead title 'An Account of the Publishing House of Bagster'. Bagster's pamphlet is scarce: the only copies on COPAC are at the LSE and Guildhall. Loosely inserted are six items, including the title-leaf of vol. 2 of 'The English Magazine' (published by Fielding and Walker, 20 Paternoster Row), with manuscript date 1778; and a cutting from 'The Antiquary' featuring an illustration of the street at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Regarding Heal's antiquarian interests Alan Crawford writes in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: 'There was a scholarly, acquisitive side to Heal. He made an important collection of eighteenth-century London tradesmen's cards which he bequeathed to the British Museum, and in his later years he compiled long lists of the names, addresses, and visual records of tradesmen, mainly from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London. These were published as London Tradesmen's Cards of the Eighteenth Century (1925), The English Writing Masters and their Copy Books, 1570–1800 (1931), The London Goldsmiths, 1200–1800 (1935), The Signboards of Old London Shops (1947), and The London Furniture Makers from the Restoration to the Victorian Era, 1660–1840 (1953). These books are invaluable for researchers. For Heal they perhaps expressed an ambivalence about the past. On the one hand, they created a tradition in which his own work could be seen and valued. On the other, they registered a loss—for, during his lifetime or before, many of these trades had ceased to be important in London's economy.'