BALE, John [BADE, Conrad]

£13,500 · Offered by Sokol Books

A beautiful copy of this rare and most influential translation into French, by the celebrated protestant publisher and author Conrad Bade, in a most elegant French binding. The binding, exceptionally well worked in gilt using fine crushed red morocco, is very much in the style of Derome the younger (see British Library Shelfmark c42c9 with his ticket). However it is almost certainly the work of the highly skilled if little known Jean-Baptiste Gosselin (whose niece married Michel Derome) and who, it is claimed, executed special bindings for Louis XVI. According to Erick Aguirre, who himself supplied this information, Gosselin bound several copies of the Bale for the bookseller Guillaume-Luc Bailly in about 1785. M. Bailly's price codes are in very small letters at the foot of the final end-paper. Mr. Aguirre has also identified this copy as lot 3913 in the 1803 M éon sale (little red numbers on foot of t-p) where it was purchased by Morel de Vind é. Bale (1495-1563), a former Carmelite monk who converted to protestantism, later bishop of Ossory, was one of the most outspoken English Protestants of the first half of the C16. After the fall of his patron, Thomas Cromwell in 1540, he fled to Germany, where he busied himself in composing the bitter diatribes which earned him the nickname "Bilious Bale". On the accession of Edward VI he returned to England to share in the triumph of the reformers and publish in London the works composed in exile. Bale initially wrote this work in L

• Binding: Hardcover

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