“I HAVE RESOLVED ON AN ENTERPRISE WHICH HAS NO PRECEDENT, AND WHICH, ONCE COMPLETE, WILL HAVE NO IMITATION”

ROUSSEAU, Jean-Jacques. The Confessions. Translated from the French by W. Conyngham Mallory. New York: Brentano’s, 1928. Two volumes. Octavo, original three-quarter burgundy morocco gilt, raised bands, marbled endpapers, top edges gilt, uncut and unopened. $700.

Handsomely bound and finely illustrated edition of Rousseau’s Confessions, the precursor of the modern autobiography.

“Claiming to present a man in ‘all the truth of nature,’ Rousseau describes in vivid and minute detail, and with complete candor (disclosing even his meanest actions and his sexual abnormalities), the incidents of an agitated life, his reactions to them, and his spiritual development” (Reid, 136). With frontispiece portrait from an original by Latour, 12 fine engravings by Hedouin reproduced from the renowned Jouaust edition of 1881, numerous woodcut head-pieces, and initial capitals printed in red.

Interiors fine; light expert restoration to extremities of original morocco. A near-fine, handsome copy.