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Estimate: $ 7,000 - $ 9,000
Whitney, Geoffrey (c. 1548-c. 1601) A Choice of Emblemes, and Other Devises, for the moste parte gathered out of sundrie writers, Englished and Moralized.
Leyden: In the House of Christopher Plantyn, by Francis Raphelengius, 1586.
First edition of the first illustrated English emblem book, quarto, title page printed within a frame of typographical ornaments, large woodcut coat of arms on verso of title (title page torn away diagonally across the center, lacking the bottom half, repaired, missing content supplied in pen facsimile); with divisional title to part two; bound in later half leather with marbled paper boards, front board detached; preliminary leaves toned with some staining; straight worming penetrating from front to back, with minimal loss; border of emblems and blank fore-edge margin on N1 recto and verso and repaired, losses supplied in pen facsimile; some diagonal corners trimmed away, a well-read copy with some scattered contemporary marginalia in Latin and English; 8 x 5 3/4 in.
STC 25438; Freeman 233; Langland to Wither 260.
Whitney's English contribution to the emblem book genre is regularly catalogued as, "known to Shakespeare." As a poet, he adds his insular take on this hitherto continental enterprise.
"The genre of emblems can [...] be considered part of visual culture. Geoffrey Whitney was credited with bringing the interest in emblems to the fore in England. [A Choice of Emblemes] was a tome designed to provide moralizing and instructive advice to its readers. In this collection, there are 248 emblems, each accompanied by a woodcut with a motto in both English and Latin, and a poem in English. This was an important English vernacular publication as it produced for the first time a comprehensive collection of the emblems that were in common usage across Europe." (Quoted from Brid Phillips's Shakespeare and Emotional Expression, Taylor & Francis, 2022, page 11.)
