?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 10,000 - $ 15,000
Rabelais, François (c. 1494-1553) Les Oeuvres.
[No Place: No Printer], 1559.
Fourth edition, possibly printed in Germany; blanks D7 & D8 present; bound in full contemporary calf with gilt tooling, quite worn, with losses, but structurally intact and housed in a custom cloth box, 4 3/4 x 3 in.
The text here includes the first four books of the Prognostication Pantagrueline, the fifth book was not published until 1562-64. Plan, in his Bibliographie Rabelaisienne, published in 1904, was not able to locate a copy, and it is still hard to find in the sale rooms and institutional libraries, with most copies found in German-speaking countries. Rawles & Screech in their A New Rabelais Bibliography, [Geneva, 1987], indicate that this particular edition "constitutes a new departure," presenting for the first time an expanded version of the Tiers Livre. Here it is organized into fifty-two chapters, as opposed to the forty-seven chapters found in previous editions. This anonymously printed edition of 1559 thereby served as the model for the subsequent 1564 Lyon edition, and stands as the definitive version going forward.
Rawles & Screech 61; cf. Plan 97; Brunet IV 1056 [note].
