Don Quixote de la Mancha.

“THE TRUTH MAY BE STRETCHED THIN, BUT IT NEVER BREAKS, AND IT ALWAYS SURFACES ABOVE LIES, AS OIL FLOATS ON WATER”: Finely Bound Set of Cervantes' Masterpiece Don Quixote

Don Quixote de la Mancha.

CERVANTES; TRANSLATED BY CHARLES JARVIS,.

Item Number: 30053

London: Printed for T. M'lean, 1819.

Octavo, 4 volumes. Bound in full contemporary polished mottled calf, gilt tooling to the front and rear panels and spine, red and brown morocco spine labels, gilt inner and outer dentelles, all edges gilt. Illustrated with 24 hand-colored plates by J. Clark. In near fine condition with a touch of rubbing. Translated by Charles Jarvis. An exceptional set. Abbey 238.

Don Quixote tells the tale of a man so entranced by reading about the chivalrous romantic ideals touted in books that he decides to take up his sword and become a knight-errant himself, with the aims of defending the helpless and warding off the wicked. With his somewhat confused laborer-turned-squire, Sancho Panza, they roam the world together and have adventures that have haunted reader's imaginations for nearly four hundred years. Don Quixote is generally recognized as the first modern novel. Over those years, it has had an incredible influence on thousands of writers, from Dickens to Faulkner, who once said he reread it once a year, "just as some people read the Bible". Vladamir Nabokov is quoted as saying, "Don Quixote is greater today than he was in Cervantes's womb. [He] looms so wonderfully above the skyline of literature, a gaunt giant on a lean nag, that the book lives and will live through [his] sheer vitality... He stands for everything that is gentle, forlorn, pure, unselfish, and gallant. The parody has become a paragon."

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