Latin and Greek classics in sixteen volumes

Amsterdam: Wetstein, 1721-1755

16 volumes  |  32mo  |  122 x 67 mm

Acquire instant erudition with this remarkably intact uniform set of classics. Includes: Ausonius, Opera, 1750; Cornelius Nepos, Vitae excellentium imperatorum, 1745; Epictetus, Enchiridion, 1750 (with Cebes of Thebes, Tabula, Demophilus, Similitudines, and Democrates, Aureae Sententiae); Florus, Rerum Romanarum libri IV, 1736 (Waesberge, Wetstein, and Smith, with notes by Johannes Isacius Pontanus); Horace, Opera, 1743 (from the edition of Daniel Heinsius and Tannegui Lefebvre, with variant readings from Richard Bentley and Nicolas Sanadon); Julius Caesar, Opera, 1746; Justin, Historia Philippicae, 1722 (from the edition of Joannes Georgius Graevius); Juvenal and Persius, Satyrae, 1735; Ovid, Opera, 1751 (in three volumes); Plautus, Comoediae, 1721 (from the edition of Joannes Fredericus Gronovius); Sallust, Opera, 1747; Tacitus, Opera, 1734 (Janssonius-Waesberge); Terence, Comoediae sex, 1755; Virgil, Opera, 1744 (from the edition of Nicolaas Heinsius and Petrus Burmanus). All nicely printed, and the types representing the best early 18th-century Dutch efforts, equaled perhaps only by those of Enschedé.  ¶  All volumes are complete (full pagination and collation available upon request). Most volumes include some combination of notes, lives, chronologies, and indexes. Most title pages are engraved, some volumes instead having a letterpress title with engraved frontispiece. Unless otherwise stated above, all editions have only Wetstein names in the imprint (even the Jansson-Waesberge Tacitus is simply the Wetstein issue with a different title page). Several volumes have a series ad for a “catalog of authors…in this same form.” If you aim to complete the series, the present collection lacks only the volumes of Curtius, Valerius Maximus, and Erasmus’s Colloquia.  ¶  Of course this is not the only such single-publisher series from the early 18th-century, with discrete volumes issued over the course of multiple decades. Odd volumes from such sets are ubiquitous. Sets that may once have belonged to a single owner have since been subject to nearly three centuries of market forces, which tend to reward division. The odds of finding available a nearly complete single-publisher series of this age, and in uniform contemporary bindings, are ever diminishing.  ¶  A wonderful snapshot of an 18th-century library.

PROVENANCE: Pure conjecture, of course, but it's worth remarking that well-to-do young men were sometimes sent to school with such attractively bound small-format sets of the classics.

CONDITION:  Contemporary mottled leather; spines tooled in gold; edges sprinkled red.  ¶  Minor wear to the extremities, with some superficial splitting of leather at the ends of some joints; a few of the thicker volumes with a crease down the spine; a bit more splitting of the leather on the front joints of the Sallust and Tacitus volumes, but even these hinges remain strong.  ¶  Internally quite fresh, and the whole ensemble really quite attractive.

REFERENCES:  Claartje Rasterhoff, Painting and Publishing as Cultural Industries (Amsterdam University Press, 2017), p. 139-140; David Pearson, Speaking Volumes: Books with Histories (Bodleian, 2022), p. 135 ("Young gentlemen from better-off families might be sent off to school, in the middle of the eighteenth century, with sets of the classics in handsome gilded goatskin bindings, fitting (and bespeaking) their status")

Item #198