Jacques le Fataliste et son maître

First edition, posthumous, on Holland paper.
Contemporary full marbled brown calf binding. Spine with raised bands, decorated. Red morocco title label, black morocco volume label. A slight lack to the lower joint at the tail. Signs of rubbing. Scuffing to the upper board with a lack of leather. One corner slightly bumped. Pages 247 and 257, lacking the right corner of the margin. Paper generally fresh. This copy has been bound in a single volume, following the 1772 edition of Diderot's Works in 6 volumes (Volume VI, II). Good copy.
The introductory text, in memory of Diderot, is by Jakob-Heinrich Meister, friend of Necker and successor to Frédéric Melchior Grimm at the Correspondance littéraire.
The novel, conceived from 1765, appeared in serial form in this review from 1778 to 1780. The published version was not, however, definitive, since Diderot constantly expanded it until his death, and the work which, in 1771, counted 125 pages, reached 200 in 1778, 208 in 1780, 287 in 1783. Yet the work, well before its French publication, was already known in Germany thanks to Schiller's translation (in 1787 in his review Thalia). Following this version, Doray de Longrais gave a French version of the same story. In 1792, Germany discovered the complete text thanks to a new translation, that of Mylius. Finally, in 1796 the original text was published in France, from a copy presumably provided by Grimm or Goethe.
An unclassifiable work that freed itself from all novelistic rules, the book draws its plot from the picaresque novel and inherits the freedom of a book that profoundly influenced Diderot: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, by Sterne.