Essays of Montaigne (De Luxe Edition, First Copy Printed)

MONTAIGNE, Michel de (trans. Charles Cotton; ed. William Carew Hazlitt). Essays of Montaigne. London: Privately Printed for the Navarre Society Limited, 1923. 5 vols.

Large 8vo (265 × 205 mm). All five volumes bound in original full vellum over stiff boards. Covers ruled and margined in gilt with gilt fleur-de-lys vignette to front boards. Spines lettered in gilt. Top edges gilt; others uncut. Marbled endpapers. Vol. I: 242 pp; Vol. II: 361 pp; Vol. III: 364 pp; Vol. IV: 338 pp; Vol. V: 347 pp. Engraved frontispiece portrait of Montaigne in each volume, reproduced from original engravings in the British Museum. Vol. I with two-leaf folding facsimile letter. Type handset at The Riverside Press Ltd., Edinburgh from a specially cast fount; printed on Arnold's British hand-made paper specially made and watermarked for The Navarre Society. Large Paper Edition De Luxe. Limited to 150 numbered sets, this being number 1. Signed by The Navarre Society and The Riverside Press Limited on the limitation page.

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533–1592) invented a literary form and, in doing so, changed the way educated Europeans understood themselves. The essay — from the French essai, meaning an attempt or a trial — was Montaigne's solution to a problem he could not otherwise articulate: how to think in public without arriving at false conclusions, how to examine one's own mind honestly, how to write about experience without reducing it to system or doctrine. His three books of Essais, written between 1572 and 1592 and revised continuously until his death, range across subjects from cannibalism to friendship, from experience of pain to the nature of sleep, from the education of children to how to die well — always returning to the same instrument of investigation, which is himself. "Each man bears the entire form of the human condition within him," he wrote. The claim is simultaneously modest and vast: the self as the proper subject of inquiry, subjective experience as the only honest starting point for any knowledge.

The influence of the Essais has been extraordinary and continuous. Francis Bacon acknowledged them as the model for his own essays. Shakespeare drew on them directly for The Tempest, and arguably for the whole project of interiority that defines his tragic characters. Descartes, Pascal, and Voltaire engaged with them seriously. Dr Johnson loved them. William Hazlitt — the grandfather of this volume's editor — wrote about them with the enthusiasm of a man who recognised a kindred mind across two centuries. Virginia Woolf considered Montaigne the first modern writer. Harold Bloom, reflecting at the end of his life on the writers who had given him the greatest sense of freedom, placed Montaigne alongside Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Dante.

The translation by Charles Cotton (1630–1687) — the seventeenth-century poet, translator, and friend of Izaak Walton — was first published in 1685 and has been the standard English version of the Essais ever since: a translation of such idiomatic confidence and sympathy with its original that it reads, as translations of this quality do, as a work of English literature in its own right rather than a rendering of a French one. Cotton's Montaigne is the Montaigne that English readers have always known. The edition was revised and edited by William Carew Hazlitt (1834–1913), the Victorian bibliographer and literary historian who was the grandson of the essayist William Hazlitt — a family connection to Montaigne's tradition that is, in retrospect, entirely appropriate.

The Navarre Society's 1923 large paper edition is one of the finest sets of the complete writings of Montaigne ever produced. The type was set by hand at The Riverside Press in Edinburgh from a specially cast fount, and printed on Arnold's British hand-made paper made and watermarked exclusively for this edition — a production specification that reflects the seriousness of the Navarre Society's bibliophilic intentions. The full vellum bindings with gilt fleur-de-lys vignettes, gilt spines, and marbled endpapers are entirely suited to the content: a form of binding associated with the great scholarly editions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — the period in which Montaigne wrote and Cotton translated — pressed into service for the most authoritative twentieth-century edition of the text.

This set is number 1 of 150. The first copy off the press, signed on the limitation page by both The Navarre Society and The Riverside Press Limited.

Near fine. Covers show a few markings here and there, some gentle bowing to some volume covers. Otherwise, in excellent order throughout. Contents generally fine: albeit for some imperfections to uncut edges, contents are clean, bright, and largely free from marks. A marvellously preserved set that presents beautifully. Bookplate of W.J. Rogers present to the FFEP of each volume.

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Catalogue Number: HH000632