Les Avantures de Telemaque, fils d'Ulysse

Edition illustrated with two frontispieces, one of them a portrait of Fénelon, and twenty-four full-page plates, one for each of the twenty-four books of the Avantures de Telemaque. Copy printed on thick Dutch laid paper.

Bound in full red straight-grain morocco, covers framed with dotted borders, smooth spines decorated with seven dotted fillets, gilt titles and volume numbers, dotted rule on board edges, gilt inner roll-tooled borders, marbled paper pastedowns, all edges gilt. Some very slight rubbing and soiling to bindings, spines sunned, some foxing, offsetting from the plates onto the half-titles.

Bookplate of Thomas Pares (1716-1805), a lawyer in Leicester and owner of Hopwell Hall, a Derbyshire country house since demolished.

A handsome illustrated edition, printed on thick laid paper of very fine quality.

This luxury edition of the Avantures de Télémaque, published in London by Robert Dodsley, reproduces on a reduced scale the illustrations of the folio edition issued in 1734 in Amsterdam and Rotterdam by Wetstein, Smith, Chatelain and Hofhout. The compositions by Vivien, Picart, Debrie and Dubourg were re-engraved for it by Scotin and Fourdrinier to suit a more manageable format. Charles Nodier praised it in his Description raisonnée d'une jolie collection de livres, notably for the elegance of its plates and the quality of its paper, which he describes as "firm, elastic, crisp".

Long read as a critique of Louis XIV's exercise of power, Fénelon's work was already regarded as a satirical allegory of his reign even before it appeared in print, manuscript copies having circulated in court circles from the autumn of 1698. This political reading owes much to the circumstances of its publication: Fénelon had just been condemned in Rome, on 12 March 1699, at the close of a long theological controversy with Bossuet over the doctrine of the pure love of God, and was then in disgrace, exiled to Cambrai. A more neutral reading sees it rather as a classic of didactic narrative: originally conceived for the education of the Duke of Burgundy, grandson of Louis XIV, to whom Fénelon was tutor, the voyage of the son of Ulysses, inspired by the Odyssey, conveys an art of government and a moral teaching of universal scope. A victim of its own uncontrollable success, the work was first printed without the author's consent in 1699; copies were withdrawn from sale and the publisher's privilege revoked, though this did not prevent the text from spreading rapidly. In great demand, it was the subject of several pirated editions before its first official publication in 1717.

A very attractive copy of this compact luxury edition, bound in straight-grain morocco.