PUTNAM, Samuel. François Rabelais: Man of the Renaissance. A Spiritual Biography. New York: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith. 1929. Large 8vo. First edition. Publisher’s beige cloth lettered in gilt to the spine and lower board, in the sumptuous dust jacket designed by Arthur Hawkins Jr. Map endpapers. Portrait frontispiece of Rabelais by Delacroix, with numerous illustrations and facsimile documents. A very good or better copy. The cloth clean and bright, the lettering just slightly rubbed. The binding tight and square, the contents clean and fine throughout. The dust jacket with no printed price, complete, gently rubbed and nicked to extremities with several tape repairs to verso.
An impressive volume of biography of the 16th century Renaissance writer. Its compiler, Samuel Putnam, was somewhat of a renaissance man himself—he left Chicago in 1927 to live in Europe, translating works in the Romance languages to fund his critical magazine, The New Review (1931-32), before turning his attention to Latin American authors, thus bringing writers from across the world to an American audience, sometimes for the first time. His ‘All the Extant Works of Rabelais’ was published in the same year by Covici Friede. Of special interest, too, comes via the rare dust jacket; Arthur Hawkins Jr. was one of the leading lights in American dust jacket illustration, and he quickly became the primary designer behind the shamefully short-lived publisher, Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, which served as the American arm of British publishers, Cape—it operated from around 1928 until Harrison Smith left the firm in 1931.
PUTNAM, Samuel. François Rabelais: Man of the Renaissance. A Spiritual Biography. New York: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith. 1929. Large 8vo. First edition. Publisher’s beige cloth lettered in gilt to the spine and lower board, in the sumptuous dust jacket designed by Arthur Hawkins Jr. Map endpapers. Portrait frontispiece of Rabelais by Delacroix, with numerous illustrations and facsimile documents. A very good or better copy. The cloth clean and bright, the lettering just slightly rubbed. The binding tight and square, the contents clean and fine throughout. The dust jacket with no printed price, complete, gently rubbed and nicked to extremities with several tape repairs to verso.
An impressive volume of biography of the 16th century Renaissance writer. Its compiler, Samuel Putnam, was somewhat of a renaissance man himself—he left Chicago in 1927 to live in Europe, translating works in the Romance languages to fund his critical magazine, The New Review (1931-32), before turning his attention to Latin American authors, thus bringing writers from across the world to an American audience, sometimes for the first time. His ‘All the Extant Works of Rabelais’ was published in the same year by Covici Friede. Of special interest, too, comes via the rare dust jacket; Arthur Hawkins Jr. was one of the leading lights in American dust jacket illustration, and he quickly became the primary designer behind the shamefully short-lived publisher, Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, which served as the American arm of British publishers, Cape—it operated from around 1928 until Harrison Smith left the firm in 1931.
