Esope

1668 · Best.-Nr. 1393 — London: Thomas Roycroft 1668. First Edition. 2 vols. in 1. First editions of both volumes. Eighteenth-century calf rebacked to style flat spine divided into seven compartments morocco lettering-piece in the second the others with a repeated gilt ornament covers with a Greek key border marbled endpapers. Fables: Title in red and black. Engraved headpiece and initial on B1 engraved frontispiece and 81 engraved plates by Hollar Stoop and Barlow; without the portrait of Ogilby found in some copies. Aesopics: Title in red and black. Engraved headpiece and initial on B1 woodcut headpieces and initials on T4 and Ee1 68 engraved plates by Hollar English Gaywood and others 39 of them illustrating the fables in the earliest issue before the plates were numbered. A near fine copy. Folio 382 x 264mm pp. vi 211 1; iv 231 1. Provenance: Henry Huth 1815-1878 with his morocco book-label; sold at the Huth sale of his celebrated library Sotheby Wilkinson & Hodge 15 November 1911 lot 63 £4 10s to James Tregaskis. References: Schuchard 13 and 16b; Wing A693 and A698; Parthey 334-390; Pennington 333-408g; Eames "John Ogilby and His Aesop" Bulletin of the New York Public Library 65/2 1961 pp. 71-88. John Ogilby 1600-1676 led one of the most varied careers of his century: dancing master theatre impresario translator publisher and late in life royal cosmographer. His folio Aesop ranks among the finest English illustrated books of the seventeenth century and among Wenceslaus Hollar's best work as an illustrator. Ogilby had first published a verse Aesop in 1651 a quarto with roughly engraved plates after Francis Cleyn. After the success of his illustrated Virgil of 1654 and 1658 he returned to the fables on a grander scale commissioning Cleyn to redraw his designs at a larger size most of them then etched by Hollar. Ogilby's methods of publication were as ambitious as the book itself. To finance it he turned to a lottery the earliest instance we've found of an author using one for a private commercial venture rather than a public work. In 1665 he offered 1821 chances at forty shillings each with prizes drawn from his own publications among them the Fables valued at £3 a copy and worth £7620 in total. Events overtook him. The Great Plague of 1665 drove many would-be subscribers out of London and in September 1666 the Great Fire destroyed much of the city including Ogilby's house and a large though now unknown part of the Fables' 1665 stock which accounts for its rarity today. A second lottery in May 1668 funded both a reprint of the first volume from the same plates and a new companion volume Aesopics. Copies are consequently most often found with the second edition of the first volume bound alongside the first edition of the second; a copy with both volumes in first edition as here is decidedly scarce. The fifty new fables of Aesopics owe more to Ogilby than to Aesop. He called himself "a Designer of my own Fables" and Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary on 27 June 1666 that "Ogilby is putting out some new Fables of his own which will be very fine and very satyricall." Whatever their merits as fables they carry the fullest measure of Ogilby's own voice: learned playful and fond of topical satire. As Eames writes "Ogilby's Aesop was a labor of love. Unlike some of his later works undertaken with a calculating eye on their chances of commercial success these paraphrases obviously afforded him pure joy in the making. Like a proud schoolboy he parades his knowledge of history and mythology in an abundance of classical references." What distinguished the volume in Eames's account was above all "the size of the volume the paper and the printing and above all the illustrations that gave it its distinction. Seldom has Aesop been more grandly treated." Few bodies of literature have traveled as far as the fables attributed to Aesop said by Herodotus to have been a slave on Samos in the sixth century BC. Collected in antiquity and recast in verse by Phaedrus in Latin and Babrius in Greek they became a staple of the medieval schoolroom and Caxton's English Aesop of 1484 was among the earliest books printed in England. Their brevity and animal disguises made them a natural vehicle for moral instruction and in times of censorship for political comment exactly the use Restoration writers like Ogilby made of them. In the same year Aesopics appeared 1668 La Fontaine published the first books of his own Fables and the tradition went on to shape children's literature and everyday speech alike from "sour grapes" to "the boy who cried wolf. Thomas Roycroft unknown