The Talisman (Easton Press Collector's Edition)

SCOTT, Sir Walter (intro. Thomas Caldecot Chubb; illus. Federico Castellon). The Talisman. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 1976.

Large Octavo. Full brown leather. Spine with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. xxv, [iii], 369 pp., including author's notes and glossary. Colour frontispiece and multiple illustrations by Federico Castellon throughout. Collector's Edition. Part of the "100 Greatest Books Ever Written" series. Among the earliest Easton Press productions.

Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) published The Talisman in 1825 as the second of his Tales of the Crusaders, and it has remained one of his most consistently readable and widely enjoyed novels despite the general decline of his broader reputation. Set in the Holy Land during the Third Crusade of 1190, it follows Sir Kenneth of the Leopard, a Scottish knight in the army of Richard I of England, whose encounter with a mysterious Arab physician named Adonbec el Hakim sets in motion a sequence of events touching honour, treachery, and the complex relationship between two great adversaries — Richard Coeur-de-Lion and Saladin, Sultan of Egypt and Syria — who are presented here not as enemies but as the two most chivalrous figures in a world that falls short of chivalry on every other side.

The identity of Adonbec el Hakim is revealed in the novel's course, and the revelation is the pivot on which Scott's meditation on honour turns. Richard, rash and imperious but genuinely great, and Saladin, controlled and magnificent, represent for Scott two competing but not wholly incompatible conceptions of nobility — the one born of Christian Europe, the other of Islamic civilisation — and their mutual recognition is the moral centre of the book. It is characteristic of Scott at his best that neither figure is sentimentalised and neither is simply heroic; both are great men in whom greatness coexists with very human failing.

The Talisman was written at a period when Scott's financial situation was deteriorating catastrophically — his publisher Constable went bankrupt in 1826, bringing Scott down with him — and the speed of composition under commercial pressure is occasionally apparent in the plotting. It has not, however, diminished the novel's power to hold a reader. The adventure narrative is vigorously managed, the historical atmosphere credibly sustained, and the central relationship between Richard and Saladin has the kind of moral weight that justifies the label of historical romance rather than mere adventure fiction.

The illustrations were produced by Federico Castellon (1914–1971), the Spanish-born American surrealist painter and graphic artist whose lithographs and etchings are held in major American museum collections. The Easton Press edition of 1976, one of the earliest productions in the "100 Greatest Books Ever Written" Collector's Edition series, presents his illustrations with an introduction by the American author and biographer Thomas Caldecot Chubb.

Fine. Presenting as new.

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Catalogue Number: HH000487