Vane’s verse cycle follows the agricultural year month by month, each poem paired with a hand-coloured plate depicting the corresponding rural labour. Plate books of this kind lose leaves constantly — buyers would often break a copy for the plates alone — so a set complete with all twelve, as this one is, is genuinely scarce.
The binding is the publisher’s original cloth with a gilt-lettered spine, a format still fairly new to the trade in 1820 and one that has held up better over two centuries than the paper-boards alternative would have.