Why it matters

Clio and Euterpe was Henry Roberts's engraved anthology of English song, issued in London across roughly 1758–1762 in three volumes with a later supplementary volume published by John Welcker; institutional copies, such as the MFA's, record a three-volume octavo set of this period entirely engraved. Roberts had already made his name with the engraved songbook Calliope, or English Harmony (1739), and these collections are valued as much for their pictorial engraved headpieces as for the music, which preserves a broad cross-section of mid-Georgian theatre, pleasure-garden and domestic song. Each song is engraved with its own pictorial headpiece (“designs adapted to each song”), which makes this one of the prettiest English songbooks of the century. The listing has gilt edges on all sides, an engraved title page with a figure of Euterpe, and what looks like an armorial bookplate. Full three-volume sets don’t turn up often.

Why we're looking

At US$850 with Best Offer, this three-volume set is asking roughly $1,000 less than the only directly comparable three-volume set we found — Colin Page Books' 1759–60 set in rebacked contemporary mottled calf at US$1,853.36 — and barely above the US$823.71 being asked for just two volumes in a modern binding by Patrick Pollak Rare Books. The seller's catalogue (Michigan regional history, signed modern firsts, DVDs) reads as a generalist rather than an antiquarian music specialist, which is often where this kind of gap comes from.

Watch out for

The seller gives only "Very Clean and Crisp" — no formal condition grade, no collation, and no plate or leaf count — which matters a great deal for a book that is engraved on every leaf; a specialist copy of the same work on the market is described as having roughly 200 engraved pages plus frontispiece and a four-page table of songs per volume, and another dealer's copy is openly recorded as lacking its title and several song leaves. Ask for a leaf-by-leaf count against the table of songs in each volume before committing. Volume dating is also commonly mixed in surviving sets (dealers note issues and reissues from the late 1750s into the 1770s under different publishers), so treat the flat "1762" in the title as the seller's shorthand rather than a confirmed uniform imprint.