[Rarebooks] fa: ROGER L’ESTRANGE - FABLES OF AESOP and Other Mythologists - Folio 1694

[ArCh]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, April 29. Images and more details can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

http://tinyurl.com/y93zryy8

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA


Roger L'Estrange: Fables, of Aesop and other Eminent Mythologists: with Morals and Reflexions... The Second Edition Corrected and Amended. London: Printed for R. Sare, B. Took, M. Gillyflower, A. & J. Churchil, J. Hindmarsh, and G. Sawbridge, 1694. Folio (32 cm) in full modern but not recent morocco; [10], 28, [8], 476 pp.; with the portrait frontispiece (by White after Kneller) and one other plate. Wing A707; ESTC R11059.

Includes L'Estrange's preface and his “Life of Aesop.” Roger L'Estrange (1616-1704) was a publisher, editor, prolific pamphleteer and pugnacious controversialist, one of England's earliest true journalists and a key figure in the Restoration period. Above all, he was an arch-Royalist and Tory, his fortunes rising and falling with the House of Stuart throughout his long life. Marginalized and briefly imprisoned after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, L'Estrange (1616-1704) increasingly turned his hand to the lucrative, and less controversial, practice of translation. None of his efforts in this field were as successful or enduring as this collection of the fables of Aesop, Anianus, Abstemius, Poggius and others. Indeed, Fables of Aesop and Other Eminent Mythologists “became the standard Aesop in English [and] was never out of print for more than a few years after its first publication, which makes it the closest English equivalent to the hugely successful collection of Aesop's fables by La Fontaine in France... This is the work that immortalized L'Estrange's name, and it is still in print today” (Line Cottegnies, “'The Art of Schooling Mankind': The Uses of Fable in Roger L'Estrange's Aesop's Fables," in Roger L'Estrange and the Making of Restoration Culture, (2008).

Binding chipped at the spine head. some sunning to the spine; contents with intermittent browning, most conspicuous on the first and last few leaves, a few small chips to the edges of the frontispiece, scattered spots and damp-staining; evidence of an early owner's use of a pin or small nail as a bookmark, one of which remains in the margin of leaf C4 (see photo above); otherwise generally quite clean and sound, firmly bound. Front paste-down with the bookplate of noted English bibliophile Charles Benson.