Rare Finds – A Guide to Rare Book Collecting

“One of the great events in the annals of learning” – Samuel Johnson.

At twenty-five, fresh from the success of his mock-heroic poem “The Rape of the Lock,” Alexander Pope proposed and began taking subscriptions for a new translation of Homer’s Iliad. With Jonathan Swift and other’s campaigning on his behalf, the response was overwhelming; Pope’s Homer became a national event, affording Pope financial independence at a time when most poets relied on patronage and permanently establishing his literary reputation.

Publisher Bernard Lintot rose to the occasion, producing from 1715-1720 six very finely printed quarto volumes, embellishing Pope’s heroic couplets with engraved headpieces, initals and illustrations. Pope’s detailed “observations” on each of the twenty-four books, along with his introductory Essay on Homer, reveal the care that the splendid poet dedicated to the “most laborious task of his life.”

All the more amazing, then, that this man with little formal education, who largely taught himself Ancient Greek, could pen the translation that Dr. Johnson judged “one of the great events in the annals of learning,” and that Coleridge called “an astonishing product of matchless talent and ingenuity.”

In 1725-1726, Pope translated Homer’s Odyssey, which Lintot likewise printed in five lovely quarto volumes uniform with the Iliad. We offer first editions of the six volumes of the Iliad, together with first editions of the five volumes of the Odyssey – altogether eleven magnificent large quarto volumes – sumptuously bound in beautiful period-style elaborately gilt-decorated red morocco.