HORACE.

£1,250 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Opera. First edition, deluxe issue, of Didot's pocket Horace, illustrated with "some of the earliest photographs used in book-illustration" (Williams, p. 19). The handsome binding is by the leading London bookbinder Francis Bedford (1799-1883).In the address to the reader, the editor refers to photography as "the marvel of our century" (p. iv). This was the earliest of three photographically illustrated editions of the classics by Didot, the others being Virgil and Anacreon. It includes six photographic reproductions of paintings depicting the localities mentioned by Horace in his works and two engraved maps. There are also eleven photographic prints of drawings by the French painter Félix-Joseph Barrias (1822-1907), Degas's teacher.Born to a renown family of French printers, Firmin Didot (1764-1836) was "the greatest typographer" (Williams, p. 118) of the family, appointed director of the Imprimerie Impériale typefoundry by Napoleon, and inventor of the term "stereotype". This edition of Horace has been described as a typographic milestone, and praised for the clarity of its minuscule types, particularly the one employed in the address to the reader, cast by Laurent & De Berny. The lowercase letters of this type measure less than a millimetre in height. Several versions of this work are known, with a variable number of illustrations. This copy matches the descriptions for the deluxe issue given by both Brunet and Rosens, with the text bordered in red and 19 illustrations in

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