Jane Austen began writing a long epistolary novel under the title First Impressions in October 1796. She had previously written stories, but this was her first attempt at a sustained piece of serious fiction. She finished in August of the following year.

That fall, her father inquired at the leading London publishers, Cadell & Davies, as to whether they would be interested in seeing the manuscript, but they declined. Without documentary evidence, it is hard to gague how the twenty-two-year-old Austen took the news. On one hand, she immediately plunged into a new version of her story “Elinor and Marianne,” the work that would ultimately become Sense and Sensibility. On the other, she made no attempt to publish anything for another fourteen years.

While she continued writing stories, reading them aloud to friends and family, it was not until her family settled on her brother’s property that Austen returned to the story of Elizabeth and Darcy. The sophisticated, seasoned author – now in her mid-thirties – set about perfecting the novel that in her naiive enthusiasm she had penned at twenty. (She had called the revision process “lopping and chopping.”)

The new title she chose still reflects the impressions that Elizabeth and Darcy make on each other at their first meeting; her first sentence – “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” – is itself universally  acknowledged as one of the greatest beginnings of world literature.

Pride and Prejudice remains Austen’s most popular, most widely translated and most frequently adapted novel, the work that most often gives readers their own first impressions of her wonderfully imagined and exquisitely detailed world. We offer a very rare first edition – one of only 1500 or so copies printed.

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.

Rare Finds offers individuals interested in Rare Books, whether you are starting your collecting or adding to it, we offer some additional insight into the antiquarian book world. We’re updating once a week for the rest of the year so stop by or add us to your RSS reader.