“THE GREATEST HISTORICAL WORK EVER WRITTEN”: FULL FIRST EDITION OF GIBBON’S LANDMARK DECLINE AND FALL, FINE IN CONTEMPORARY TREE CALF

GIBBON, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. London: Printed for W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1776-1788. Six volumes. Quarto, contemporary full speckled brown calf sympathetically rebacked, elaborately gilt-decorated spines, red and green morocco spine labels.

Full first edition set of one of the great classics of Western thought, with three engraved folding maps by Kitchin of the Western and Eastern Roman Empire and of Constantinople and frontispiece portrait of Gibbon. A very handsome and fine full first edition set.

“This masterpiece of historical penetration and literary style has remained one of the ageless historical works… Gibbon brought a width of vision and a critical mastery of the available sources which have not been equaled to this day; and the result was clothed in inimitable prose” (PMM 222). “For 22 years Gibbon was a prodigy of steady and arduous application. His investigations extended over almost the whole range of intellectual activity for nearly 1500 years. And so thorough were his methods that the laborious investigations of German scholarship, the keen criticisms of theological zeal, and the steady researches of (two) centuries have brought to light very few important errors in the results of his labors. But it is not merely the learning of his work, learned as it is, that gives it character as a history. It is also that ingenious skill by which the vast erudition, the boundless range, the infinite variety, and the gorgeous magnificence of the details are all wrought together in a symmetrical whole… It is still entitled to be esteemed as the greatest historical work ever written” (Adams, Manual of Historical Literature, 146-7).

All 1000 copies of the first edition of Volume I were sold within two weeks of publication in January 1776. While in the process of printing the proposed first edition of 500 copies, the printer increased the order to 1000 copies; certain corrections were made in the first two hundred or so pages of the book in the second 500 copies, the remainder of the text being the same in all 1000 copies. All 1000 copies of Volume I were offered for sale at the same time. Volume I here is the first state of the first edition, Norton variant a with errata uncorrected and leaves X4 and a4 signed. Frontispiece portrait in Volume I; maps of Eastern Roman Empire and Constantinople bound in Volume II; map of the Western Roman Empire bound in Volume III. Bound with first three half-titles. Norton 20, 23, 29. Rothschild 942. Grolier 100.

Maps and text generally fine. Small marginal early ink mark on p. 21, Vol. III. Only a handful of very minor spots of foxing, contemporary calf very handsome. An exceptionally lovely full first edition set of this landmark.