An outstanding copy of the first translation of Don Quixote in any language

CERVANTES SAAVEDRA, Miguel de.

The History of the Valorous and Wittie Knight-Errant, Don-Quixote of the Mancha. Translated out of the Spanish [By Thomas Shelton].

London: Printed by William Stansby for Ed. Blount and W. Barret, 1612.

1st Edition. Hardcover. Very Good. Item #002585

4to (179 x 134 mm). [24], 1-336, 335-430, 451-594 (i.e. 576), [4] pp., including vignette on title-page, head- and tail-pieces, two unnumbered final leaves of verses, text printed within single-ruled borders. Signatures: [par]4, A-Oo8 Pp2; 302 leaves. Translators dedication signed Thomas Shelton. Included as frontispiece (not called for in this first edition) is the engraved additional title-page of the first edition of part II published in 1620. Near contemporary polished calf, rebacked preserving most of the original spine leather, spine with four raised bands, all edges gilt, boards and spine ruled in gold and tooled and ruled in blind (boards scratched, extremities rubbed, corners scuffed). Dark-green endpapers, front pastedown damaged probably from removed bookplate. Text very little browned only, occasional very minor spotting, the engraved frontispiece, somewhat smaller in size and laid-down on paper, is more heavily browned and little frayed at fore-margin. Leaf E3 with small hole (paper flaw) in blank margin, pp. 212, 567, 568, and 573 with some offsetting resulting in touched or just shaved upper ruled-border, light ink smudge to p.281. Provenance: Spottiswoode family, Scotland; Kennet-Were family, Sidmouth, Devon, England. An outstanding copy of a genuinely rare book, rarely found complete as here.
FIRST EDITION IN ENGLISH. Shelton's celebrated translation of the first part of Don Quixote (Cervantes did not put forth the second part until 1615) is both the first translation into English and the first translation into any language. Shelton based his inspired but rather literal translation on the 1607 Brussels edition of Don Quixote. (see Randall & Boswell, p.14). Shelton's translation was published in 1612 while Cervantes was still alive. William Stansby, a major bookseller as well as a printer with one of the most impressive presses in London, produced this volume for Edward Blount, who was probably the most notable English publisher of his day. (see Randall & Boswell, p.15).
Content: Leaf 1r title, 1v blank, 2rv dedication, 3r-7r To the Reader, 7v-9v Certain Sonnets, 10r-12v Table of Contents, 13r-300v [paged 1-594] Text, 301r-302v Verses. (see Knowles, 1943, p.205). The errors in pagination that occur in our as in all known copies: 46-47 misprinted 64-65; 78-79, 77-78; 269, 273; 412, 413; 413, 412; 426, 446; 452-453, 468-469; 579, 597. Peculiar to this copy is the lacking page number for p.424 and p.243 is misprinted 43 (this misprint not listed in Knowles 1943).
"Part One, the first appearance of Cervantes in English, is so rare that it remained unidentified until 1892, when Quaritch catalogued a copy and described the difference between it and the 1620 reprint (without line-borders, etc). Copies had in fact been in several collections and sales, but unrecognised; Jackson in 1940 knew of fourteen, "though several are imperfect". [Quarich] had one copy in original vellum (Cat. 335), and there is one now in the Rosenbach Foundation in original calf; all others known are rebound, and many copies offered over the years with facsimile title-pages are in fact the 1620 reprint." (Quaritch Cat. 969, 1977). There was no copy of the first edition of Part I in either the Huth, Hoe or Britwell collections and the copy in the British Museum is imperfect, wanting the title-page and one other leaf. (Quaritch Cat. 369). Sawyer, in his 1927 catalogue (no. 89) says that "complete copies of the rare first issue are valued as high as £600." Quaritch offered a sound copy of the first edition together with the 1620 first edition of part two in his catalogue no. 369 (1922) for £500. Its rarity is confirmed by the fact that only one complete copy is recorded at auction in the past 50 years (the Newton copy sold at Sotheby's in 1985).
A census conducted by Knowles (Knowles, 1943, p.207) gained 17 copies, many of them defective: Leonard Kebler No. 1 (now at Library of Congress), A. Edward Newton, Cambridge Univ. (lacking t.p.), Rosenbach Foundation, Barcelona, Carl T. Keller, British Museum (lacking t.p.), Oxford Univ., Gabriel Wells (bookseller), Barton Currie, Pierpont Morgan Library (lacking t.p.), New York Public Library (Berg Collection), Bemis, Huntington Library, Library of Congress, Frank J. Hogan, Leonard Kebler No. 2 (now at Folger Library, lacking t.p.). Our copy is not listed in the Knowles census as it does not exactly conform to any of the 17 collated copies; the Sonnets as in the Newton, Cambridge or Rosenbach copies are all in uncorrected state whereas the errors in paginations are mostly corrected. Our copy thus is most similar to the British Museum copy. We could trace further copies which may however in part been traded copies of the Knowles list: Dartmouth College Library (lacking t.p.), Clark Library of UCLA, Houghton Library, Beinecke Library in Yale (imperfect), Newberry Library Chicago, Sorbonne Univ. in Paris, Biblioteca Nacional de Espana, Newnham College, and Senate House Libraries of the Univ. London.
The copy in the Henry E. Huntington Library (STC/1302:01) contains the engraved title of the 1620 second edition of part I, which was issued without a letterpress title-page. The frontispiece contained in our copy is from the first edition of part II and represents the earliest known English pictorial representation of Don Quixote. According to Lo Ré, it is based closely on the engraved title page of Francois Rosset's Seconde partie de l'Histore de l'ingenieux, et redoubtable Chevalier, Don-Quichot de la Manche, Paris, 1618. (Lo Ré, 1991). Renold Elstrack, who at the time worked for the printer William Stansby, was likely the engraver (Randall & Boswell, p.39).
Literature:
Gordon-Duff E. Notes on the hitherto undescribed First Edition of Shelton's translation of Don Quixote 1612-1620. London, privately printed, n.d. (1916).
Knowles, Edwin B. The First and Second editions of Shelton's Don Quixote Part I: a Collation and Dating. Hispanic Review, IX [1941]: pp. 252-265.
Knowles, Edwin B. Some Textual Peculiarities of the First English "Don Quixote". In: The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Third Quarter, 1943), pp. 203-214.
Lo Ré, Anthony G. The Second Edition of Thomas Shelton's Don Quixote, Part I: A Reassessment of the Dating Problem. In: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 11.1 (1991), pp. 99-118.
Randall, Dale B.; Boswell, Jackson C. Cervantes in Seventeenth-Century England: The Tapestry Turned. OUP Oxford, 2009.
Watts, H. E. Translations of Don Quixote. In: Notes and Queries. 8th ser, Nov. 18, 1893, 402-3.
Linsalata, Carmine Rocco. Smollet's hoax: Don Quixote in English, Stanford Univ. Press, 1956.

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