FONTAINE CONTES ET NOUVELLES PRIVATE PRINTED ENGLISH ED

      La Fontaine's Tales:
Imitated
 in English Verse.

 London:
PRIVATELY PRINTED
1814
Two volumes

Generations of children have been brought up on La Fontaine's Fables, but no parent would leave his Contes et nouvelles en vers lying around the nursery. They were the fruit of wicked delight in the tales he found in Boccaccio's Decameron, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Rabelais and elsewhere. Marital misdemeanours, resourceful females and addled males inspire some richly inventive plotting. Though the writing is more suggestive than vulgar, it still has the power to shock readers unprepared for the darkness that inhabits these poems.
 
  An "Advertisement" in Volume I states: "For more than a century, the sportive Tales of La Fontaine have been the delight of the French youth of both sexes. Some of these have been occasionally translated by Prior and others; but the whole, for the first time, is now presented to the Public in English.

Although dated 1814 in both volumes there is no indication of the publisher or printer of this work and are most likely a later 19th century unauthorised pirate edition of a work first published in 1814.

460 Pages in total

1880s bookplates in both volumes of W. H. Nation.

Condition
Original plain paper covered boards and plain spine with glue strengthened hinges and loss to part of spine of volume 2, foxing to endpapers, slight foxing to a few pages, all complete.
Size of each volume is 8 by 4¾ inches

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