Search

First edition of this anonymous translation of the third century Greek romance Aethiopica, a work highly prized in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe as perhaps the earliest prose adventure. It was admired and imitated by European authors such as Racine, Mme de Scudéry, Marin le Roy de Gomberville, Cervantes, and Aphra Behn and exercised a profound influence on the development of the European novel. This translation is sometimes ascribed to Louis-François de Fontenu. Cioranescu 29097; Quérard, La France littéraire IV, 57; Cohen/de Ricci 478; Lewine 236; Gay I, 160; Hoefer XXIII, 822.

A rare early edition of the French translation of The History of Charlotte Summers; the author’s imitation of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) and translated by Fielding’s own French translator. L’Orpheline angloise had first appeared the previous year also with a (false) Londres imprint. Rochedieu p. 109.

First edition. Considered to be the best play the author wrote in the traditional medium, a landmark in the history of the Italian theatre. The author was later the first Italian playwright to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

A rare and celebrated courtly collection of amatory letters and verses. Le Pays’ post as a government official at Grenoble apparently left him ample leisure for literary composition, and this, his best-known work was much admired by the duchesse de Nemours, who became his patron. Le Pays seems to have found special favour among female readers, though the author of many of the letters here portrays himself rather as a high-class sex tourist --a curious letter from London extols the splendour of English women’s breasts and their visibility.

It was reprinted numerous times (several editions appeared in the same year). The first edition (also 1664) bears a Grenoble imprint, Gay denotes ours, with the Paris Sercy imprint, the second. Despite the number of early editions, legitimate or pirated, printed in the same year all appear rare outside France. Gay I, 99.