CERVANTES SAAVEDRA, Miguel de.

by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

£97,500 · Offered by Sokol Books

The first complete edition in English, and the first English edition of Part II, of this ground-breaking literary work – the first modern European novel, rarely found complete, as a uniform set. Attributed to Renold Elstrack, the engraved frontispiece, which reprised the title vignette of the first 1618 French edition, was the illustration of Don Quixote and Sancho to appear in print. ‘“Don Quixote” is one of those universal works which are read by all ages at all times, and there are very few who have not at one time or another felt themselves to be Don Quixote confronting the windmills or Sancho Panza at the inn’ (PMM 111). The epic novel tells the deeds of the minor aristocrat Alonso Quijano, so keen a reader of medieval chivalric romances that he loses his mind (or pretends to), and becomes absorbed in an imaginary world of knightly adventures. After assuming the name ‘Don Quixote’, as a knight-errant, he travels with his witty squire Sancho Panza (a local farmer), facing comic situations he interprets as heroic, including the famous, symbolic and now proverbial fight against windmills. ‘[Cervantes’s] great effects are broad and ample; they spring from the contrasts of incongruous circumstance viewed in the dry light of satiric observation. […] A master on unwinking irony […] a man of genius, a rare contriver of incident’ (Saavedra, p.xxxiii). Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616) led a picaresque life. He fled Madrid in 1569, after a duel. In Rome, he served Cardinal

• Binding: Hardcover

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