TRISTAN & ISEULT.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Tristan chevalier de la Table Ronde, nouvellement imprime a Paris. The earliest feasibly obtainable French edition, the fourth overall, of the romance of Tristan and Iseult (Isolde), giving Tristan his place among the knights of the Round Table.Considered the father of the French illustrated book, the Parisian bookseller Antoine Vérard issued four editions of Tristan, the most popular of the chivalric prose romances he published. His first, printed for him by Jean Le Bourgeois of Rouen and dated 30 September 1489, is the editio princeps, but it is not illustrated or decorated. Second and third editions, with illustrations, followed in c.1496 and c.1499. This fourth and last edition is also illustrated, but with some changes. "The same number of large woodcuts is used in the same places in the text, but they are not always the same woodcuts. Some were cropped, others must have worn out entirely, for they were replaced by new ones. In volume one, the combat of knights in the countryside appears again on fol. a1, but at the end of the volume, on fol. y4v, a woodcut originally used in Vérard's edition of Cesar's commentaries of 1488 is surrounded by decorative borders to fill up the requisite space. In volume two, three large woodcuts from Lancelot are re-employed: one of Arthur and Guinevere (fol. A1), another of Arthur and his knights at the Round Table (fol. D6), and a third representing Lancelot at the Douloureuse Garde" (Winn).Although Pickford estimates that Vérard publishe

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