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Exceptionally rare and spectacular 17th century editions of both volumes of Cervantes’ masterpiece Don Quixote; comprising one of the most desirable pairings of both volumes: Cervantes' final revised third edition of Part I and the scarce first edition of Part II

CERVANTES SAAVEDRA, MIGUEL DE.

El Ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha. Segunda Parte del Ingenioso Cavallero Don Quixote de la Mancha.

Madrid: Por Juan de La Cuesta, vendese en casa de Francisco de Robles, librero del Rey 1608-1615.

Exceedingly rare and spectacular 17th century editions of both volumes of Cervantes’ prized work, the remarkable Beilby Thompson-Maggs-Ortiz Linares copy with a shared provenance spanning over 320 years, this is among the oldest known sets of both parts paired and uniformly bound in the 18^th century, comprising one of the most desirable pairings of the editions of each volume selected for the superior qualities of their respective printings: the third edition of Part I – printed in 1608 – being the last edition corrected and revised by Cervantes himself which remains its definitive form, and the scarce first edition of Part II – printed in 1615 – which is one of the rarest editions of any of Cervantes’ works obtainable.

Editions of Don Quixote printed during Cervantes’s lifetime are the crown jewel of Spanish book-collecting, as the four Folios of Shakespeare are to English book-collecting, a complete set in a uniform 18th century binding is of the utmost rarity; a once-in-a-lifetime acquisition.

Octavo, two volumes uniformly bound in full 18th century granite basane with burgundy morocco spine labels lettered in gilt, gilt ruling to the spine in six compartments within raised bands, double gilt ruling to the front and rear panels, speckled edges, wood engraved headpieces, initials and tailpieces, Juan de La Cuesta’s woodcut printer’s device of a hooded falcon with the motto Post Tenebras Spero Lucem to each title page.

Part I: El Ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha. Madrid: Por Juan de La Cuesta, vendese en casa de Francisco de Robles, librero del Rey, 1608. Third Madrid edition.

The rare third Madrid edition of the first part of Cervantes’ masterpiece was the last edition to be corrected and revised by Cervantes himself and the best, in terms of printing quality and artistry, of the editions printed by La Cuesta. Its text contains additions and alterations of fundamental importance for modern critical editions and has remained an authority for centuries.

Encouraged by the success of other fictional works, such as Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (The life of Guzman de Alfarache), Francisco de Robles, printer to the king, bought the rights to publish Don Quixote in the summer of 1604 for 1,500 reales. On September 26, 1604, the privilege to print the work was granted and De Robles contracted Juan de la Cuesta, manager of the press of Pedro Madrigal in Madrid, to undertake the printing, which began in late September 1604 only days after the license to publish was granted. The printing was completed in December 1604 and Murcia de la Llana composed the errata.

The true editio princeps (first printed edition) of Don Quixote was riddled with typos and errors due to the low-quality typography that characterized Spanish printing at the time and the speed with which the book was produced. Its success, however, was instantaneous and demand for more copies was so high that as early as March 1605 (only months after the completion of its first printing), de Robles and La Cuesta were planning a second edition.

In June 1605, La Cuesta printed the second edition of Don Quixote which corrected many of the major errors of the first edition, but simultaneously created new ones.

It was not until the third edition, again printed by La Cuesta at the expense of Robles in 1608, however, that the text of the first part of Don Quixote found its definitive form, revised by the author, himself, who lived “two steps away from the printing shop” (Rico, p. xcii). This third edition contained Cervantes’ final revisions.

Title with the mark of Juan de La Cuesta, 2r: with the Tassa, dated Valladolid on December 20, 1604 (at 3 maravedis per sheet, the tax rises to 255 maravedis), and with an approval dated Madrid on June 25, 1608 signed by Francisco Murcia de la Llana, 2v: approval of Juan de Amezqueta dated Valladolid on September 26, 1604, 4r: dedication by Miguel de Cervantes to Alonso Diego López de Zúñiga, 6th Duke of Béjar (1578-1619), A1r: text (misplaced notebook), 1r: Prologue, 5r: poems and sonnets, B1r: continuation of the text, 2M6v: table of chapters

Part II: Segunda Parte del Ingenioso Cavallero Don Quixote de la Mancha. Por Juan de La Cuesta, vendese en casa de Francisco de Robles, librero del Rey, 1615. First edition.

The original and very rare first edition released in 1615 would become an even greater success for Cervantes and, because it was devoured by the public so quickly, remaining copies are scarce.

It is not certain when Cervantes began writing Part II of Don Quixote, but he had probably not proceeded much further than Chapter LIX by late July 1614. In September, however, a spurious Part II, entitled Second Volume of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha: by the Licenciado (doctorate) Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, of Tordesillas, was published in Tarragona by an unidentified Aragonese who was an admirer of Lope de Vega, rival of Cervantes. Avellaneda’s identity has been the subject of many theories, but there is no consensus as to who he was.

Hastened to complete Part II in order to take revenge on Avellaneda, in January 1615, Cervantes finished the final chapters of Part II and it was published in November 1615, again by Juan de La Cuesta at the expense of Robles. The success was once again immediate and considerable. The book was devoured by the public to the point that, today, the first edition of Part II of 1615 is known to be rarer than that of Part I of 1605.

Like the first edition of Part I of Don Quixote, the first edition of Part II contained many errors. In 1998, thanks to his remarkable study on the typographical recomposition of three notebooks from the original edition of 1615, R.M. Flores was able to carry out an extrapolation on the number of errors in the original editions of 1605 and 1615. He estimated this number at eight thousand possible errors and concluded, “It is becoming more and more obvious that this is exactly what has happened in the case of Cervantes’ works. We perceive Cervantes’ style, vocabulary, and orthography only through the irregularities, imperfections, and impurities of the bottle-glass panels placed between us and Cervantes’s writings by the composers of the first editions of these works.”

Flores was able to detect two different states in three notebooks of this edition (A, G, Q) following their recomposition by three composers (out of ten) from the workshop of Juan de La Cuesta. The Ortiz Linares copy is in first condition similar to the Serís 12 listed copy of the Hispanic Society of America. These state distinctions for the 1615 were made, however, at the beginning of their history, Flores specified: “It has been tacitly accepted that all copies of the first edition of Don Quixote, Part II (Juan de la Cuesta, Madrid, 1615) were made up with sheets belonging to the same printing. This long held, though hitherto untested assumption is incorrect. A thorough collation of copies Seris 12 of the Hispanic Society of America and Arch.B.e 7/3 of the Bodeliain Library reveals a substantial number of textual and typographical variants between these two copies. No two copies of the first edition of Don Quixote, Part II, are identical” (R. M. Flores, “A Tale of Two printings: Don Quixote, Part II”, Studies in Bibliography, 39, 1986).

Title with the mark of Juan de La Cuesta, 2r: with the Tassa, dated Madrid on October 21, 1615 (at 4 maravedis per sheet, the tax rises to 292 maravedis), and with the Fee de erratas, also dated Madrid October 21, 1615, 2r: approvals given in Madrid, November 5, 1615, by Gutierre de Cetina, March 17, 1615, by Joseph de Valdivieslo, and February 26, 1615 , by Marquez Torres, 5r: privilege granted to Cervantes by the king, for twenty years, on March 30, 1615, 6r: Prólogo al lector, in which Cervantes complains about the publication of Fernandez de Avellaneda, 8r: epistle of dedication by Miguel de Cervantes to Pedro Fernández de Castro, 7th Count of Lemos (1576-1622), dated Madrid, October 31, 1615, A1r: text, 2N1r: Tabla de los capítulos, 2N4r: En Madrid, por Iuan de la Cuesta, Ano M.DC.XV

Provenance: Beilby Thompson (1742-1799), owner of the Escrick Park Estate, with his 18th century armorial bookplate to each pastedown – his sister Jane Thompson (1743-1816), wife of Sir Robert Lawley (died 1793) — Sir Paul Beilby Lawley Thompson (1784-1851), became 8th Baron Wenlock in 1839, then by descent — Maggs Brothers, London, sold to Jorge Ortiz Linares on 21 December 1936, for £850.

Beilby Thompson owned the Escrick Park estate in Yorkshire, which covered an area of over 10,000 hectares. “Having inherited the family estate at the age of seven or eight, Thompson went on to study at Cambridge, entering Christ’s College in November 1759. He was a fellow commoner (an affluent, usually aristocratic, student granted among other privileges that of sharing with the Fellows of a College the amenities of the high table) and seems – as was frequently the case for such students – not to have graduated. He served as a Yorkshire MP for nearly thirty years and was evidently a keen collector of books. Thirty of his books are recorded in the ESTC database of pre-1801 English imprints and hundreds of others probably lie unnotified on library shelves” (Cambridge University Library Special Collections). Thompson’s fine library at Escrick Parkin housed a classical collection and books on Italian topography. Because Thompaon had no direct heir, “Miss Irene Lawley in 1912, on the death of her father Lord Wenlock, inherited the Escrick Park estate in Yorkshire. Death duties amounted to £60,000, of which she raised £20,000 at once by sales, paying the rest at the rate of £5,000 a year for eight years. But since her net income was only £4,000 a year, she had no choice but to let the house, and ultimately to sanction its conversion to flats” (D. Cannadine, The Decline and fall of the British aristocracy, New York, 1999, p. 129). The current owner of Escrick, Sir Charles Forbes Adam, a distant descendant of Beilby Thompson, confirmed the departure of these Cervantes at the turn of the 1930s: “I cannot say exactly, but I know that when my grandparents left Escrick Park in 1930/31 there were sales of books, paintings etc.” Still, these two Cervantes arrived at Maggs in the early 1930s without any trace of an auction being found.

Bolivian diplomat and famed book collector Jorge Ortiz Linares (1894-1965) served as the Bolivian ambassador to Paris after World War II. He was the son in law of Simón I. Patiño, one of the world’s wealthiest men of the early 20th century, also known as “The Tin King” or “The Andean Rockefeller.” Jorge Ortiz Linares began as a Civil Attache to the Bolivian Legation in late 1925 and subsequently as Second Secretary, First Secretary and Advisor until 1941. He was appointed Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of Bolivia to France from June 1947 to October 1948. He then held the same functions in Belgium and the Netherlands, while retaining his Parisian residence. The apartment Jorge Ortiz Linares shared with his wife Graciela Patiño on 34 Avenue Foch in Paris during his long ambassadorship became one of the centers of artistic and high-society life. He passionately collected rare books and manuscripts from early ages, focusing on two areas: his native Hispanic-American world and French literature, in time building one of the great libraries of the era. In 1951, he was appointed Special Advisor by the Bolivian Embassy in Paris and was decorated with the Legion of Honor.

Linares purchased Don Quixote from Maggs, bookseller to the Kings, in 1936. He visited the famed London bookshop for the first time in the early 1930s in search of great editions of Don Quixote, but left empty-handed and was placed on a waiting list. A few years later, the phone rang at Linares’ Parisian mansion on 34 Avenue Foch and he was told that Maggs had just secured a superior copy for him. He returned to London and purchased the books on December 21, 1936 for £850, along with a very rare original edition of Cervantes’ Novelas of 1613, and thus began one of the greatest book collections of the 20th century.

Condition:

Part I: Notebook A is incorrectly placed. Small rust hole in C5 with missing 3 letters, angular missing in I2 without any damage to the text, 2I6 poorly printed. Back of volume I restored by Maggs in the 1930s Inner margin of ff. P2 and PA with a paper break without any missing. Small tear without missing (approximately 3 cm) in the first white leaf of volume 1 (1608). Some restorations to the binding.

Part II: underlining in brown ink in 2M6.

Each volume housed in a custom folding silk chemise and full crushed levant morocco box by Zaehnsdorf.

The most important set of Don Quixote volumes to appear on the market in thirty years, four centuries after they were printed in Madrid, and almost a century after they were bought by Ortiz Linares, the books are the rarest and best example to have reached the market in decades.

The most important set of Don Quixote volumes to appear on the market in thirty years, editions of Don Quixote printed during Cervantes’s lifetime are the crown jewel of Spanish book-collecting, as the four Folios of Shakespeare are to English book-collecting, a complete set in a uniform binding circa 1750 is of the utmost rarity; a once-in-a-lifetime acquisition.

Price: $1,900,000.00     Item Number: 142820