Featured on PDR in the collection Antiquities of Mexico (1831–48)

February 1837: in a cell of the Sheriff's Prison in Dublin, Edward King, Viscount Kingsborough, drew his last breath before passing away from typhoid fever. He had been incarcerated for only a few days before contracting the infection that would kill him; the cause of his imprisonment, by all accounts, was unpaid debts to a disgruntled paper merchant. Lord Kingsborough had apparently been unable to cover the cost of publishing Antiquities of Mexico (1831-48), the sprawling magnum opus to which he devoted nearly two decades of his life. (According to Sylvia D. Whitmore’s biography of Kingsborough, he owed some £40,000, at a time when £500 constituted a comfortable annual budget for an entire family.) Like his debt, the scale of Kingsborough’s project was enormous —…