The Chiswick Press Utopia
MORE, Thomas; Ralph ROBINSON (translator). Utopia with Roper’s Life of More and Some of His Letters. London: Chiswick Press for George Bell and Sons. 1903.
Folio. Publisher’s cream quarter cloth with brown cloth sides, printed labels to spine and upper board, fore- and tail-edges uncut, two spare printed labels tipped in at end; pp. xi, [1 (blank)], 265, [1 (colophon)]; text printed in red and black on paper watermarked ‘Chiswick Press’, title within elaborate woodcut border signed W.L. Bruckman, frontispiece incorporating reproduction of Holbein’s portrait of More with tissue guard, 5- and 8-line woodcut initials, large woodcut vignettes to pp. 8 and 17 after Ambrose Holbein; some soiling and rubbing to boards, splitting to cloth at upper joint; sporadic light foxing throughout, heavier to endpapers and first and final leaves, p. 39 browned; but a very good, sound copy.
No. 177 of 220 copies of the handsome Chiswick Press edition of the first English translation (1551) of More’s Utopia, illustrated with woodcuts after those of Ambrosius Holbein, brother of Hans Holbein the Younger, to the 1518 Basel edition.
Utopia ‘inveighs against the new statesmanship of all-powerful autocracy and the new economics of large enclosures and the destruction of the old common-field agriculture, just as it pleads for religious tolerance and universal education’ (Printing and the Mind of Man).
This edition reproduces the Utopian alphabet and a stanza in the Utopian language from the 1518 edition (p. 151) and includes a life of More by William Roper, his son-in-law, as well as several of his letters, many to his daughter Margaret. A further 210 copies were privately printed for distribution in New York by the Chiswick Press for the Scott-Thaw Company.
SKU: 2125784