Candide, or Optimism (Easton Press Collector's Edition)

A$80 · Offered by Harry Hartog Rare Books · No longer available

VOLTAIRE (François-Marie Arouet; trans. Richard Aldington; intro. Paul Morand; illus. Sylvain Sauvage). Candide, or Optimism. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 1977. Large Octavo. Full blue-grey leather. Spine with three raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. xix, 131 pp. Colour frontispiece and black and white illustrations by Sylvain Sauvage throughout. Collector's Edition. Part of the "100 Greatest Books Ever Written" series. First Easton Press edition. In January 1759, a slim volume appeared in Paris under the title Candide, ou l'Optimisme , attributed to a fictitious "Doctor Rarb_lph" and translated from the equally fictitious German. Voltaire denied authorship vigorously and unconvincingly. Within weeks it had been seized by the authorities in Paris, Geneva, and Rome; within months it had been translated into multiple languages and was being read across Europe. It has been in print continuously ever since. François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778) — who published under the name Voltaire from his twenties onward — had spent a career dismantling received ideas with a wit so precise and an irony so controlled that its targets rarely saw the blow coming. Candide is the culmination of that career. It was written in response to two things: the catastrophic Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which killed tens of thousands and seemed to demand some account from those who maintained, following Leibniz, that the Creator had arra

• Binding: Hardcover

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