The History of The Valorous and Witty-Knight-Errant, Don Quixote, of the Mancha Bound With The Pleasant Notes Upon Don Quixot

CERVANTES SAAVEDRA, Miguel de; Translated by Thomas Shelton.

Item Number: 14050

London: Printed by Richard Hodgkinsonne, for Andrew Crooke, 1652.

Two works bound in one volume. Quarto, full brown leather, gilt tooling and titles to the spine, gilt device to the front and rear panel, raised bands. Bound with the first edition of Edmund Gayton’s Pleasant Notes Upon Don Quixot, which was published in 1654. Three title pages (The History being divided in two parts) with woodcut devices, ornamental head- and tail-pieces, and large decorated initials. In very good condition with some toning to the text. The Pleasant Notes Upon Don Quixot was a commentary on Cervantes, with three early references to Shakespeare. Repeatedly Gayton departs from its subject to introduce colorful anecdotes of contemporary London. Shakespeare is named in a list of English writers on p. 21; on p. 95, Don Quixote is called “The Shakespeare of the Mancha.”

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."