Knight (Joseph) On the cultivation of the plants belonging to the natural order of Proteeae, fine hand-coloured engraved frontispiece, wood-engraved printer's device to title and verso of final text f., scattered spotting to text, bookplate, contemporary half calf, 4to, 1809.

*** An important and rare early work on the proteas, we know of only the Quentin Keynes copy previously at auction.

Joseph Knight (1778-1855) worked as George Hibbert's gardener, during which time he became one of the first people in England to successfully propagate Proteaceae. The book itself contains only 13 pages on the cultivation of the plants, with the remaining 100 anonymously authored by George Salisbury and dedicated to taxonomic revision of the family. As later transpired, George Salisbury had plagiarised a number of the names from Robert Brown whose paper On the Proteaceae of Jussieu had been read at the Linnean Society earlier in the year with Salisbury in attendance but had yet to be printed. By beating Brown to print therefore Salisbury was able to claim priority for the names. In the ensuing scandal, Salisbury was dubbed a plagiarist and shunned by the botanical community, with his subsequent works ignored during his lifetime. Letters from the time indicate that some even went so far as disposing of their copies of Knight's work likely explaining the current rarity.