First edition of his first and most important single collection. The printed proposal for "publishing by subscription 'Scotch Poems' by Robert Burns" appeared on 14 April 1786, and publication followed swiftly on 31 July. Of the edition of 612 copies, priced at 3 shillings, 350 had been subscribed for. By 28 August, all but 13 copies had been sold, and Burns was ready to grasp the profit of "near twenty pounds" as a means of emigrating to Jamaica, far from the complications of his love affair with Jean Armour.
John Wilson (1758-1821) was one of a new breed of small-town printers and booksellers in 18th-century Scotland. By 1780, aged 22, he had established a book and stationery shop in his hometown of Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, then the largest town in the county, where he undertook jobbing work on a printing press he had taken over from another bookseller, Peter M’Arthur. From 1782 he branched out into printing books, all religious and conservative titles at first. Once established, he began to print new works. He printed these either at the author’s expense or, as with Burns’s poems, by raising subscriptions from friends and well-wishers. In 1790 he moved the press, under the supervision of his brother and partner Peter, to the county town. The firm continued in various permutations for another 30 years, but the Kilmarnock imprint itself lasted only a decade. Wilson served the poet well by producing "a volume that is very charming in appearance, and not without reminders of the French press-work of the period" (Grolier).
The book's rise in value up to 1933 is traced by John Ross, who observes that up to the 1850s it could be had for close to or even less than its original price of 3 shillings, the benchmark only changing in 1858 when "a copy was sold by auction in Edinburgh for 3-10-0, and one in Glasgow, the year following, realised 8." When a copy in original boards sold for £72 in February 1898, it became "the most amazing price ever realised for a modern book" (Grolier English).
Provenance: John Whipple Frothingham (1878-1935), nephew of William Augustus White (1843-1927), the great collector of Elizabethan literature and William Blake. Following his uncle’s death, Frothingham inherited a portion of White’s library, which he removed to France and added to, where it remained until his sale, Bibliothèque d’un amateur (2eme partie), Yann Le Mouel, Drouot, Paris 8 April 2015, lot 20.