Le Morte Darthur Sir Thomas Malory • Aubrey Bearsdley Illustrations King Arthur

Description: Le Morte D'arthur by Thomas Malory with Illustrations and Ornaments by Aubrey Beardsley London: Studio Editions, 1993. Hardcover. xxv, 624 pp. VG. Clean and firm. A bit settled from having been stored upright. Crisp corners. Bright pages. Free of markings. One of the early masterpieces of English prose writing, Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur was a celebration of the chivalry and romance associated in medieval times with the court of King Arthur. Drawing almost entirely on French legends about the Arthurian kinghts, Malory wrote in a style which any modern reader can understand, and with a vitality which has ensured him unending popularity over the centuries. Within a few years of its composition, William Caxton, the father of English printing, produced a printed edition of Malory's epic in 1845, making it the first fictional work to reach a comparatively wide readership. It is on Caxton's text that the present edition is based, with only spelling and punctuation modernized but the original grammar and vocabulary retained. Over four hundred years after the first edition, the publisher J.M. Dent set out to find an artist to illustrate a new version of Le Morte Darthur, to be issued in twelve parts. A friend introduced him to a strange young man named Aubrey Beardsley, whose talent was not yet recognized, and over the following eighteen months or so Beardsley created the vast number of black and white illustrations in this book. A mixture of detailed full-page drawings, ornamental borders, illuminated initials and smaller decorations, they undoubtedly established Beardsley's reputation as an original talent. They also account for a large proportion of his total output, for he died tragically young, at the age of 25. This beautiful book is a facsimile of Dent's second edition, issued in 1909, which was limited to only 1,000 copies for the United Kingdom and 500 for America and brought together all the parts into a single volume. It contains ten extra drawings by Beardsley, which had somehow been omitted from the first edition, but reappeared when it came to publishing the second.

Price: 56.5 USD

Location: Charleston, South Carolina

End Time: 2024-09-28T18:34:45.000Z

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