Candide, or Optimism (Folio Society Limited Deluxe Edition)

VOLTAIRE (François-Marie Arouet; trans. Tobias Smollett; intro. Julian Barnes; illus. Quentin Blake). Candide, or Optimism. London: The Folio Society, 2011.

Square Quarto (266 × 222 mm). Full burgundy Nigerian goatskin. Covers and spine blocked in gold with a design based on Quentin Blake's handwriting. Top edge gilt. Dark grey endleaves. Printed on Modigliani paper in Garamond type by Grammlich, Germany; bound by Beltz, Germany. Pp. 7–204. 18 full-page colour illustrations and over 20 pen-and-ink drawings by Quentin Blake throughout. Dark grey slipcase blocked in gold with enlargement of Blake's titling. Limited deluxe edition. Limited to 1,000 numbered copies for sale (plus 25 lettered copies not for sale), this being number 10. Signed by the illustrator Quentin Blake on the limitation page. Long out of print.

In January 1759, a slim anonymous volume appeared in Paris and Geneva simultaneously, attributed to a fictitious Doctor Ralph and purporting to be a translation from the German. Voltaire denied authorship vigorously and unconvincingly. Within weeks it had been seized by the authorities; within months it had been translated and read across Europe. Candide, ou l'Optimisme was written in response to two things: the catastrophic Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which killed tens of thousands and demanded some account from those who maintained that the Creator had arranged things in the best of all possible ways; and the Seven Years' War, then in progress, which was providing daily evidence of the human capacity for organised slaughter. Voltaire's instrument was a young man of unfailing good nature and Panglossian optimism whom he subjected to every calamity the eighteenth century could supply — war, shipwreck, earthquake, the Inquisition, slavery — before arriving at the most practical of all philosophical conclusions: that one must cultivate one's own garden.

The Folio Society edition of 2011 is among the most distinguished productions of this work in any language. Quentin Blake (b. 1932) — the British illustrator best known for his long partnership with Roald Dahl, the first Children's Laureate, and a Knight of the Realm — brings to Candide the precise qualities the text demands: an apparently effortless line that conceals considerable intelligence, a gift for physical comedy, and a capacity for rendering disaster with cheerful insouciance that exactly matches Voltaire's own. The 18 full-page colour illustrations and more than 20 pen-and-ink drawings distributed through the text are among the most sympathetic visual interpretations the work has received.

The translation is by Tobias Smollett (1721–1771), whose version of 1762 — produced for his thirty-five-volume edition of Voltaire's collected works — was the first complete English rendering and retains a period fidelity to Voltaire's tone that later translations have not always matched. The introduction is by Julian Barnes, whose engagement with French literature and thought makes him a particularly apt guide to what Voltaire was doing and why it still matters.

Near fine. Some very faint foxing to preliminaries; otherwise fine throughout. Slipcase shows mild shelf wear.

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Catalogue Number: HH000581