Natural History, 5 volumes (Folio Society Edition)

PLINY THE ELDER (Gaius Plinius Secundus; trans. H. Rackham, W. H. S. Jones & D. E. Eichholz; intro. Anthony T. Grafton). Natural History. London: The Folio Society, 2012. 5 vols.

Large Octavo. All five volumes bound in quarter buckram and colour-pictorial papered boards. Covers bearing illuminated medieval manuscript pages designed by Randy Apslund, in homage to Pliny's influence in the Middle Ages. Spines lettered in gilt. Printed on Abbey Wove paper. Gilt-decorated slipcase. Vol. I: xviii, 370 pp (Preface and Books 1–7); Vol. II: x, 429 pp (Books 8–16); Vol. III: x, 384 pp (Books 17–23); Vol. IV: xii, 354 pp (Books 24–32); Vol. V: x, 421 pp (Books 33–37). 108 full-page colour plates throughout. First Folio Society edition.

Gaius Plinius Secundus — Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE) — was a Roman administrator, naval commander, and polymath whose curiosity about the natural world was so uncontainable that it killed him: he sailed toward Vesuvius in August 79 CE in order to observe the eruption at close quarters and to rescue people from the shore, and died from the fumes on the beach at Stabiae. He had spent the preceding years assembling, from some two thousand books, a compendium of all human knowledge of the natural world — its geography, its peoples, its animals, its plants, its minerals, its arts and its sciences — that he himself described as encompassing "the natural world, or life." The thirty-seven books of the Naturalis Historia, completed in 77 CE, constitute the only work by Pliny to have survived antiquity, and one of the largest single works to have survived from the Roman Empire. It is not a work of original research but of synthesis and organisation: a monument to the ambition of the ancient encyclopaedic tradition, and an inexhaustible source of information about what educated Romans in the first century believed about the world they inhabited.

The Natural History covers mathematics and the structure of the universe; the geography and ethnography of the known world; human anthropology and physiology; zoology; botany, agriculture, and horticulture; medicine; minerals, fine arts, and gemstones — encompassing, along the way, detailed accounts of ancient painting and sculpture that constitute the primary source for much of what we know about classical visual art. It is unreliable, credulous, wonderful, and indispensable. Pliny himself acknowledges in the preface that his book is a work of compilation rather than scholarship, and the preface itself — addressed to the Emperor Titus — is one of the most charming pieces of self-deprecation in Latin literature.

The translation by H. Rackham, continued after his death by W. H. S. Jones and D. E. Eichholz, was first published by Harvard University Press in the Loeb Classical Library between 1938 and 1962. It remains the standard scholarly English translation, and the Folio Society edition uses it in full for the first time in a single accessible set. The introduction by Anthony T. Grafton, one of the foremost historians of the classical tradition and its reception, provides essential scholarly context. The binding of each volume shows a beautifully illuminated page — a homage to the influence that Pliny exerted in the Middle Ages. The 108 full-page colour plates reproduce illustrations from medieval and early modern natural history manuscripts and printed books in the Plinean tradition, giving the set both scholarly and visual distinction.

Very good to near fine. Some markings to the top edge of each volume, most prominent to Volumes II and III; otherwise clean and bright inside and out. Slipcase shows some shelf wear and markings.

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Catalogue Number: HH000578