8vo. vi, [2], 332pp. With an engraved frontispiece and numerous illustrations by the author in the text. Original publisher's green cloth, stamped in gilt and blind. Lightly rubbed and marked, spine bumped. Later inked ownership inscription to FEP, scattered spotting.

'Born in London, and never having been out of sight of St Paul's until I had reached my twenty-second year, the tobacco-warehouse where my father worked, became my playground; and my first remembrances are of rolling in the tobacco-leaf, as country children would roll in a hay field, and playing at "hide-and-seek" in the empty barrels. In after years, when I helped my father to manufacture many hundred pounds of tobacco-leaf, I little thought that my pen and pencil would be called into use over a book like this.'

The first edition of artist and antiquary Frederick William Fairholt's (bap. 1814, d.1866) authoritative illustrated history of the manufacture and use of tobacco.