An attractive and uncommon edition of Aesop’s tremendously popular fables, profusely illustrated with almost two hundred, crisply printed woodcuts. The first Lallement edition, this work is a reimpression of Besongne’s 1730 edition, down to the portrait of Aesop prefacing the title page and the illustrations. There are some textual differences; the quatrains preceding each fable in the earlier edition, by Isaac de Benserade - originally written to accompany fable themed fountains in the labyrinth at Versailles - are not found here.
The history of illustrated editions of the fables of Aesop is a long one, starting with the first in Bamberg in 1461. Charming, ribald and occasionally grotesque, it is those woodcuts in the first section here, La Vie d’Esope (the text translated from Byzantine scholar Maximus Planudes’ thirteenth-century Life) that are especially striking. Throughout, the fabulist is portrayed as a grotesque, short and portly figure, drawn directly from Planudes’ physical description of him as ‘a turnip with teeth’ (see ‘Wise Animals’).
Provenance: Ex-libris of Jacques Pouquet on verso of front endpaper.
Not in Cohen, Brunet, Tchemerzine. Ref: Planudes cited in C. Ottenhoff & D. Sears, ‘Aesop’s Life and Legend’, in Wise Animals: Aesop and his Followers, Online Exhibition Catalogue (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, 2012).
(OCLC: US: Princeton only..)
