[Rarebooks] fa: RICHARD KNOLLES - GENERALL HISTORIE OF THE TURKES - 1621

[ArCh]

Auction ending Sunday, October 16. Images and more details can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

https://tinyurl.com/37k9kk5p

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA


Richard Knolles: The Generall Historie of the Turkes, from The first beginning of that Nation to the rising of the Othoman Familie: with all the notable expeditions of the Christian Princes against them. Together with the Lives and Conquests of the Othoman Kings and Emperours, unto the yeare 1621. London: Printed by Adam Islip, 1621. Two volumes, folio (31 cm), in early calf-backed marbled boards, gilt-lettered morocco spine labels; [10], 1396, [40] pp.; engraved title-page, 30 (of 31) portraits, and 1 in-text illustration ("the Bridge made over Danubius by Sinan Bassa, Anno1595"), genealogical tables, woodcut head- and tail-pieces and initials. STC 15053; ESTC S112918.

The third edition, but the first to include Edward Grimeston's continuation of the history up to the year 1621. Described as "a masterpiece of narrative synthesis" (DNB) and "the greatest of English works of the Renaissance dealing with Turkey" (Samuel Chew, The Crescent and the Rose,), Knolles' chronicle, which took him twelve years to write, was the first major history of the Ottoman Empire to be written in English. No less an admirer than Samuel Johnson described Knolles' work as an "artful arrangement" of "a wonderful multiplicity of events" that displays "all the excellencies that narration can admit," and Lord Byron, who said that the History was one of the first books he read with pleasure as a child, confessed that it "gave me perhaps the oriental colouring which is observed in my poetry."

Bindings rubbed, hinges cracked but the boards holding; bound without the initial blank leaf; lacking one text leaf (pp. 759-60) and one portrait (Achmat the First) with adjoining text; several leaves with the lower margins trimmed away or replaced by blank slips in an effort to excise an early owner's marginalia; these excisions occasionally affecting parts of the text; occasional browning and staining to the leaves, a few closed edge tears, but the contents generally quite clean and fresh. Title-page laid down, with some soiling and chipping, and an early ownership inscription, possibly of a John (Joh[ann]is) Gamage, indicating that the book was acquired in 1624. Later signature and bookplate of William Carr.