THUCYDIDES

£40,000 · Offered by Sokol Books

Beautifully printed edition of Claude de Seyssel s translation into French of Thucydides famous History, beautifully preserved in a simple but very elegant binding made for the library of the most celebrated English collector of the C16th, the English Grolier , Thomas Wotton of Boughton Malherbe, Kent. Thomas Wotton, the English Grolier was the first Englishman to collect a planned library of gold-tooled bookbindings. About 140 volumes have survived from his library. A large group of these bears the Grolier-like tooled inscription Thomae Wottoni et Amicorum , some have stamped armorials, some ..have the simple tooled date 1552, and some have no special signs of ownership on their covers but can be traced back to him by provenance. Wotton belonged to a prosperous Kentish family is not known to have attended either of the English universities, but his library suggests an educated man with good knowledge of Latin the language of scholarship; he did not own any Greek texts. Needham. According to Nixon, this binding is part of group IV. Simple bindings before 1553, type D .. Binding [with] ownership inscription in the form THOMAE WOTTONI ET AMICORUM and the date 1550. In place of the medallions, this has a lozenge containing four impressions of a tool . Thucydides has been described as the father of scientific history because of his strict standards of evidence gathering and analysis of events in terms of cause and effect. He has also been called the father of the school of politi

• Binding: Hardcover

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.