LA DIVINA COMMEDIA OR THE DIVINE VISION OF DANTE ALIGHIERI IN ITALIAN & ENGLISH 1928 LIMITED NONESUCH EDITION

LA DIVINA COMMEDIA OR THE DIVINE VISION OF DANTE ALIGHIERI IN ITALIAN & ENGLISH 1928 LIMITED NONESUCH EDITION

£995.00

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[ALIGHIERI, DANTE]. La Divina Commedia Or The Divine Vision of Dante Alighieri in Italian & English. The Italian text edited by Mario Casella of the University of Florence with the English version of H. F. Cary and 42 illustrations after the drawings by Sandro Botticelli. Published by The Nonesuch Press, London, 1928.

First Nonesuch edition, number 1326 from a limited edition of 1,475 copies; leather-bound, hardcover, folio; pp. [viii], 324, [4]. Italian and English dual-parallel text printed in double columns on Van Gelder paper at the Westminster Press in Poliphilus an Blado type faces. Bound in publisher's original full orange vellum titled in gilt on smooth spine, with gilt fillets and central ornaments on covers; top edge gilt, other edges uneven; with 34 double- and 8 single-page plates after drawings by Sandro Botticelli. Condition: VERY GOOD. Light sunning to spine, the joints and hinges perfectly intact, importantly the boards are not bowed, interior near fine and without previous ownership markings. An attractive copy.

Notes: In one of the most striking volumes produced by the Nonesuch Press, Dante's masterpiece is presented here with parallel text in Italian and English. This is a finely designed and bound edition, with Dante's Italian printed parallel to Cary's English translation, and with reproductions of Sandro Botticelli's illustrations, engravings of which were used in the first Florentine edition of the Divine Comedy (1481). Rev. Henry Francis Cary's translation of Dante's Comedy first appeared in 1814, and it was much loved by Coleridge, who praised it during a lecture at the Royal Institution. The Italian text is in the definitive edition prepared by the philologist Mario Casella (1886-1956) and first published in 1925, corrected and improved by Casella specially for this publication. Ransom p. 367; Dreyfus 50.

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