Essais de Michel Seigneur de Montaigne. Cinquiesme edition, augmentée d’un troisieme livre et de six cens.

In-4°, 496pp, first leaf is an etched title, woodcut headpieces and initials. Bound in nineteenth-century dark blue morocco signed ‘Alix’, spine gold stamped in six compartments, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt, title engraving trimmed as is usual. Fresh copy. The first complete edition of Montaigne’s Essais, one of the most influential and profound works of world literature. This is the last edition printed during the author’s lifetime and the definitive text on which all later editions are based. The volume, the so-called ‘cinquièsme edition’, is in fact the fourth edition, and contains the first appearance of the third book, printed from Montaigne’s manuscript copy (Sayce offers an interesting hypothesis for the odd numbering of this edition: “The substitution of fifth for fourth edition may have been prompted by the desire to suggest that the book was selling better than it was, a trick unknown today.”). Montaigne’s association with Abel L’Angelier, among the great printer-editors of the time, was as much a coup for the author as it was for the publisher, and the present volume’s format, “larger than the normal L’Angeier quarto, gives Montaigne’s book a certain prestige” (Desan, p.42). The present copy is typical of surviving 1588 editions, almost all of which have been rebound in 19th-century morocco (Desan, p.42). Desan, Biblioteca Desaniana: Catalogue Montaigne, pp 41-2, no 14; Tchemerzine-Scheler IV, 843; Sayce & Maskell. A Descriptive Bibliography of Montaigne’s Essais, 1580-1700, no. 4; PPM note 95.