Peter Bichsel   Fine Books

Aesop. Les fables d’Esope phrygien ave celles de Philelphe. Traduction nouvelle enrichie de Discours Moraux et Historiques, et de Quatrains ….

Title in red and black. With engr. frontispiece by J. M. Stock, engr. title-vignette, and 60 engr. plates by Georg Paul Busch. 478, (10) pp. 12mo. Contemp. full calf over five raised bands. Spine gilt with label (front cover with worm traces). – Copenhagen, heirs of Rothe and Proft, 1773.

Attractively illustrated edition of Bellegarde’s compilation of fables by Aesop, Philelphus, Babrius, and Avianus, first published in Amsterdam in 1708. The neat illustrations to the 117 Aesopian fables are by the Berlin engraver G. P. Busch (d. 1756). We could trace these illustrations – Aesop’s life in 6 scenes on 1 plate, 59 plates with 2 fable motifs each – also in a Amsterdam edition of the year 1736, while Bodemann lists them in the Copenhagen edition of 1757. The frontispiece by the Nuremberg born Johann Michael Stock (d. 1773) shows Aesop with a human and animal audience and we suppose it to be published for the first time in the present edition. Stock was a teacher of Goethe in 1766. – Cf. Bodemann 97.3; Fabula docet 124; Bénézit II, 223 (Busch) and VIII, 130 (Stock). – Small stamp on title verso. Some browning throughout, but still a very nice copy. – Best.-Nr. 6784