Rare Finds - A Guide to Rare Book Collecting

“In accuracy, thoroughness, lucidity, and comprehensive grasp of a vast subject, the Decline and Fall is unsurpassable.” (DNB)

“It was at Rome,” Gibbon writes, “on the 15th of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.” He set seriously to the task in 1768, and eight years later achieved instant and lasting fame with the publication of the first volume of his comprehensive masterwork, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

All 1000 copies of the first edition were sold within two weeks of publication in January 1776. Gibbon continued to work for the next decade, finishing the sixth and final volume in 1788. His History remains the authority on the decay of the Roman Empire, and his extraordinary scholarship is still considered impeccable.

“This masterpiece of historical penetration and literary style has remained one of the ageless historical works” (PMM 222).

We offer an excellent nearly full first edition set (Volume I third edition, issued just one year after the first; Volumes II through VI first editions) of Gibbon’s masterpiece, complete with three engraved folding maps of the Western and Eastern Roman Empires and of Constantinople, bound in handsome 18th-century calf.