MOTHER GOOSE

Tales of passed Times by Mother Goose. With Morals. Written in French … and Englished by R. S. Gent. To which is added a new one, viz. the discreet Princess. The six [sic] Edition, corrected. And adorned with Cuts. // Contes du tems passé de ma mere l’oye … [etc.]

London: [but The Hague?] Printed for S. Van den Berg … 1764.

8vo, pp. 224, [1], with parallel English and French title-pages; frontispiece engraving of Mother Goose telling stories to three children, and eight engraved plates; ‘The Discreet Princess; or the Adventures of Finetta. A Novel’ has separate title-pages in English and French, dated 1764; text in English and French on facing pages throughout; a few leaves slightly dusty, but a fine copy, uncut, in contemporary (Italian?) boards, spine ruled in blind, covers somewhat stained, joints and edges worn.

£7500

Approximately:
US $9461€8751

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Tales of passed Times by Mother Goose. With Morals. Written in French … and Englished by R. S. Gent. To which is added a new one, viz. the discreet Princess. The six [sic] Edition, corrected. And adorned with Cuts. // Contes du tems passé de ma mere l’oye … [etc.]

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First parallel-text edition of Perrault’s famous fairy tales, in English and French, with fine illustrations after Hendrik Immink. Perrault has long been eclipsed in fame by that of his stories – ‘Little Red Riding-Hood’, ‘Blue Beard’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Puss in Boots’, ‘Cinderilla’, ‘Tom Thumb’ – which have become archetypes of the fairy tale. They first appeared in French in 1697 and then in a translation of 1729 by Robert Samber, Histories, or Tales of past times, which also added ‘The discreet princess’ a novella by Perrault’s niece, Marie-Jeanne l’Héritier de Villaudon.

The early editions of Perrault in English are of the greatest rarity, none before the present recorded in more than two copies in ESTC. There were five editions by c. 1755, and another very similar translation, slightly more condensed than Samber’s, which is first known in a ‘third edition’ of 1763, ‘Englished by G. M.’. The present edition follows the ‘G. M.’ translation, despite the title-page, and is the first to print it alongside the original French.

ESTC records two issues, known in a total of seven copies: of the present, there are copies at BL, Bodley; Library of Congress, and UCLA. Of the other issue, ‘Printed for J. Melvil’, there are copies at Boston Public, Huntington, and Pierpont Morgan.

Cohen-De Ricci 789.

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