48pp. Title and calendar in red and black. Not in ESTC.

[Bound with:] The Ladies' Diary: of Woman's Almanack, For the Year of our Lord 1792... London. Printed for the Company of Stationers, And sold by Robert Horsfield, [1792]. 48pp. Title and calendar in red and black. ESTC N3191.

[And:] The Ladies' Diary: of Woman's Almanack, For the Year of our Lord 1793... London. Printed for the Company of Stationers, And sold by Robert Horsfield, [1793]. 48pp. Title and calendar in red and black. ESTC T58295.

[And:] The Ladies' Diary: of Woman's Almanack, For the Year of our Lord 1794... London. Printed for the Company of Stationers, And sold by Robert Horsfield, [1794]. 48pp. Title and calendar in red and black. ESTC T58296.

[And:] The Ladies' Diary: of Woman's Almanack, For the Year of our Lord 1795... London. Printed for the Company of Stationers, And sold by Robert Horsfield, [1795]. 48pp. Title and calendar in red and black. ESTC N3192.

8vo. Contemporary parchment-backed powder-blue paper boards. Rubbed and marked. Text-block dampstained at foot. William St Clair's copy, with his distinctive pencilled ownership inscription to recto of FFEP.

Five sequential late eighteenth-century editions of the immensely popular almanac, The Ladies' Diary. First published by John Tipper in 1708 and including household receipts in cookery and medicine alongside the traditional astronomical and chronological almanac fare, the popular success of the mathematical puzzles included at the end of the first edition influenced the future direction of the publication. The subsequent editors included several influential mathematicians, such as Thomas Simpson (1710-1761), and Charles Hutton (1737-1823).

William St Clair (1937-2021), British scholar and senior civil servant, notable as the author of The Godwins and the Shelleys, The Biography of a Family (1989) and The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (2004).