[Rarebooks] Offering: First edition in English of COUNT LUCANOR, 1868.

[Michael John Thompson]

Offering:

MANUEL, Don Juan. YORK, James [translator].

COUNT LUCANOR: Or, The Fifty Pleasant Stories of 
Patronio, Written by the Prince Don Juan Manuel, 
A.D. 1335-1347. First Done into English from the 
Spanish, by James York, Doctor of Medicine. mdccclxviii.

Piccadilly: Basil Montague Pickering. 1868.

First edition in English. Small octavo, original 
brown cloth with line decorations in red, gilt 
titles on spine panel. Elaborate decorated title 
page, Aline Press device on verso of half-title 
leaf. xvi + 246 pp. Note: both front and rear 
free endpapers bear publisher's ads. Outer rear 
spine hinge neatly repaired, light wear at 
extremities. Previous owner's names on front 
endpaper and half-title leaf, bookseller's 
description (describing a different, inscribed 
copy) affixed to front pastedown; a very good, 
sound copy. ¶ The rare first edition in English 
of this classic 14th Century Spanish work. Don 
Juan Manuel [1282 -1348], the son of don Fernando 
and the nephew of Alfonso X the Wise, king of the 
Kingdom of Castille. One of the first books 
written in Castillian, the 'language of Romance', 
COUNT LUCANOR has as its sources the works of 
Aesop, the classsics, and Arabian folktales but 
is very much an original work. The fifty-one 
stories of Count Lucanor are all written as 
"framed stories" - a story within a story. In 
each story Count Lucanor asks his servant 
Patronio a question, and gives him a problem to 
solve. Patronio on his part tells a story with a 
similar problem and from its conclusion a 
solution is extracted. Count Lucanor likes the 
solution and he puts this moral in a verse in his 
book. The book also contains two hundred proverbs 
that are still known and common today. Highly 
influential on William Shakespeare and Hans 
Christian Anderson - who based his tale THE 
EMPEROR'S NEW CLOTHES on one of the stories in 
this work - COUNT LUCANOR is generally considered 
to be one of the earliest works of prose fiction.

$500.00 Cdn

Trade discount allowed. Terms: as usual.


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