Why it matters

One of the most successful English gardening manuals of the eighteenth century, issued month-by-month as a working calendar and reprinted for decades after its first 1767 appearance. The title-page attribution to Thomas Mawe is a publisher's device: the text was written by the Scottish gardener John Abercrombie, whose name was added to the title only from the seventh edition of 1776, making the 1773 sixth edition the last to carry Mawe's name alone. The title is the whole point. This was gardening written for everyone, not for dukes, and it became the best-selling gardening book of its century, revised for more than a hundred years. The name on the title page, though, is a fiction. John Abercrombie was the son of an Edinburgh market gardener who had worked at Kew and run his own nursery but was unknown to the reading public. His publisher arranged for Thomas Mawe, gardener to the Duke of Leeds, to lend his more famous name, for twenty guineas. When Abercrombie later visited Mawe in Yorkshire, he found a man so powdered and so laden with gold lace that he thought he was meeting the Duke himself. Abercrombie finally added his own name in 1776, and he lived to see 18 editions. He was, by his own account, sustained by tea and a pipe smoked six hours a day. This 1773 sixth edition is the last under Mawe’s name alone, with the charming frontispiece of two gardeners digging and hoeing. It’s worn, it’s cheap, and it’s exactly the kind of book that was kept by the back door.

Why we're looking

A genuine 1773 London printing in unrestored contemporary patterned calf, with the engraved frontispiece present, from an ABA/PBFA/ILAB member who gives collation and bibliographic references. On relative value the picture is mixed rather than a clear bargain: the one directly comparable 1773 sixth edition we found, at Island Books, is £296 (roughly $390) but in fresh twentieth-century calf and described as bright and crisp, while an earlier 1771 fifth edition, rebound and Very Good, sits at just £65 on AbeBooks — so at $238.55 with loose hinges and internal faults this looks fairly, not sharply, priced.

Watch out for

The seller is candid about structure and surface: hinges loose and joints weak (a binding that may need attention before handling), a small loss to the top border of the frontispiece, and an abraded patch on C6-7 with minimal text loss, plus ink stains, foxing and a 1947 inscription. The description gives a page collation but does not explicitly say the volume is complete and free of other defects, so confirming that the frontispiece is the only plate called for and that nothing else is lacking is worth a direct question. Shipping from the UK adds $35.93, which narrows the gap to UK-based comps.