The History of the Most Renowned Don Quixote of Mancha: And his Trusty Squire Sancho Pancha, Now Made English according to the Humour of our Modern Language. And Adorned with several Copper Plates.

CERVANTES SAAVEDRA, Miguel de.

Item Number: 3872

London: Printed by Tho. Hodgkin, and are to be sold by John Newton, 1687.

First edition of the first illustrated edition in English of Don Quixote. Folio, bound in full brown calf to period, raised bands, elaborately gilt-decorated spine, red morocco spine label. With copper-engraved frontispiece and eight copper-engraved plates, each bearing two images. Translated by John Phillips. In very good condition with all plates present. Some minor wear and a small paper repair to one page. An nice example of this rarity.

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". Vladamir Nabokov is quoted as saying, "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."