About this Book
AESOP (c.620-564 BCE) and Francis BARLOW (c.1626-1702, artist). Aesop’s Fables with his Life: in English, French and Latin. Translated by Thomas Philipott and Robert Codrington. London: Printed by William Godbid for Francis Barlow, 1665., Folio (370 x 240mm).
Pre-fire First edition and large paper issue of Barlow’s masterpiece on Aesop’s Fables. The first edition of 1665-1666 is a rare survivor as nearly all copies were destroyed in the 1666 London fire. According the Yale Center for British Art who has a similar copy, the first edition was largely destroyed in the London fire, this copy has the Rob. Codrington (trans.) entry on the title page, consistent with the pre-fire first edition. A second edition was published in 1687 with additional plates to illustrate the life of Aesop and with Philipott’s verse replaced with new verse by Aphra Behn. A third edition was issued in 1703 and a posthumous French edition appeared in 1714, published in Amsterdam.
The Fables themselves are in English verse (by Mrs Behn) and French and Latin prose, each followed by a moral. Illustrated throughout with detailed images of animals and scenes, this edition stands as a landmark book in the history of printing, definitely a rare feat of the 17th century. Hodnett describes Barlow’s anatomically-skilled drawings as ‘the special glory of the Aesop illustrations’ and affirms ‘No artist has responded with more sensitivity and less sentimentality to the gentle grace of deer … The least of creatures, the frog, the hare, the snake, and the swallow, and the least favored of them, the ass, the boar and the wolf — he draws them all with an intimacy, charm, and inviolable integrity never surpassed in an English book’, (Edward Hodnett, Francis Barlow: First Master of English Book Illustration, London, 1978, pp.182, 185). The fables we now associate with the (legendary) ancient author Aesop have a complicated textual transmission history, but they have been an important part of the educational tradition of the Greco-Roman world and its successors for thousands of years—not only teaching moral lessons but playing a role in language instruction through their many translations.
