Vida Y Hechos Del Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote De La Mancha: Con Muy Bellas Estampas Gravadas Sobre Los Dibujos de Coypel, Primer Pinto de el Rey de Francia.

CERVANTES SAAVEDRA, Miguel de.

$8,800.00

Item Number: 92807

En Haia [The Hague]: Por P. Gosse y A. Moetjens, 1744.

Rare early printing and one of the most highly coveted editions of Cervantes’ masterpiece. Octavo, 4 volumes, bound in full calf, gilt titles and elaborate gilt tooling to the spine, burgundy spine labels, triple gilt ruled, marbled endpapers, all edges red, ribbons bound in, with numerous engravings after the drawings of Antoine Coypel, renowned for the paintings he produced for King Louis XIV of France including those decorating the ceiling of the Royal chapel at Versailles. In near fine condition. An exceptional example.

Don Quixote tells the tale of a man so entranced by reading about the chivalrous romantic ideals touted in books that he decides to take up his sword and become a knight-errant himself, with the aims of defending the helpless and warding off the wicked. With his somewhat confused laborer-turned-squire, Sancho Panza, they roam the world together and have adventures that have haunted reader's imaginations for nearly four hundred years. Don Quixote is generally recognized as the first modern novel. Over those years, it has had an incredible influence on thousands of writers, from Dickens to Faulkner, who once said he reread it once a year, "just as some people read the Bible". Vladimir Nabokov said of the book: "Don Quixote is greater today than he was in Cervantes's womb. [He] looms so wonderfully above the skyline of literature, a gaunt giant on a lean nag, that the book lives and will live through [his] sheer vitality... He stands for everything that is gentle, forlorn, pure, unselfish, and gallant. The parody has become a paragon."