HAKLUYT, Richard.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Hakluyt's Collection of the Early Voyages, Travels, and Discoveries, of the English Nation. First edition thus and "the best and most complete edition" (Lowndes), one of 250 royal paper copies. This is the third overall - the first for two hundred years - and reflects the revived interest in Elizabethan maritime activity. It is an accurate reprint of the best folio edition, with the addition of those voyages which were published in the first and omitted in the second. Sabin describes the material published in Volume V, which includes accounts of India, America, and the West Indies, as "quite as important as either of the volumes published in [Hakluyt's] time" and D. B. Quinn, scholar of the European age of discovery, notes that this edition "made up at last a coherent body of Hakluyt material in an unabridged form, from which the greater part of his output could be read, studied and judged". Richard Hakluyt's Principall Navigations, first published in 1589 and augmented between 1598 and 1600, "is not only an epic of English prose but a unique source of reference to the great discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries" (NMM).

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