[Rarebooks] fa: ENGLAND DESCRIBED 1659 (w/ Ms. notes of printer/poet PIERRE DE CARDONNEL)

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, October 13. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/m3hzuff

Thanks,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.


Edward Leigh: England Described: Or the Several Counties & Shires thereof briefly handled. Some things also premised, to set forth the Glory of this Nation. London: Printed by A.M. for Henry Marsh at the Signe of the Princes-Arms in Chancery-lane, near Fleetstreet, 1659. FIRST EDITION. Small 8vo (17 cm) bound in later full morocco with gilt-lettered spine titles; [16] + 234 + [6] pp.; with three leaves of publisher's adverts. Wing L994; Thomason E.1792[2]; Goldsmiths-Kress 1439.2; ESTC R202677.

Not only a delightfully informative early travel guide, with local lore, place-name origins, geographical features, etc., provided for hundreds of shires, towns, and sites, but also a bit of a promotional puff-piece for England itself ("Albion, the most famous Island, without comparison, of the whole world...seated as well for air as soil, in a right fruitfull, and most milde place...").

Binding with some light rubbing and sunning to the edges and spine; first two and last two leaves browned at the edges, intermittent toning and occasional light spotting to the others, title-page with shallow chipping, one leaf with corner torn away, affecting the printed marginal notes on verso; otherwise quite clean and sound, firmly bound. The title-page bears the early/original owner's inscription, "Ex Bibl. P. de Cardonnel, G[e]n[t].", and they are presumably de Cardonnel's tidy penciled underlinings and ink marginalia (neatly written in a fine 17th-century hand) that are sprinkled throughout the text. Additionally, the rebinder has laid down two more leaves of ms. notes onto the refreshed paste-downs. Pierre de Cardonnel (1614-1667), was a French-born, London-based merchant, book collector and man of letters, who has gained some degree of literary posterity as "one of the first recorded readers of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan", his annotated copy of the book, given to him by the Earl of Devonshire (Hobbes's patron) in 1652, inspiring at least one scholarly monograph and suggesting that he and Hobbes might well have known each other. De Cardonnel was also a translator (the first to translate Dryden and Waller into French), a sometime printer (Samuel Bochart's Geographia sacra, 1646), and a writer of courtly and dedicatory poems. (For a detailed account of his life, career and intellectual world, see "Pierre de Cardonnel, Merchant, Printer, Poet, and Reader of Hobbes" in Noel Malcolm's Aspects of Hobbes; Oxford, 2002).