AESOP (c.620-564 BCE) and Francis BARLOW (c.1626-1702, artist). Aesop's Fables with his Life: in English, French and Latin. Translated by Thomas Philipott and Robert Codrington. London: William Godbid for Francis Barlow, 1666.

Tall and attractive large-paper copy of the first edition of Barlow's illustrated Aesop. "The relatively few copies known [of this edition] are all survivors of the Great Fire of London, which swept over the printer's premises in 1666" (Morgan). The fables we now associate with the (possibly legendary) ancient author Aesop have a complicated textual transmission history, but they have been an important part of the educational tradition of the Greco-Roman world and its successors for thousands of years—not only teaching moral lessons but playing a role in language instruction through their many translations. "Perhaps no book has been more read by children ... certainly no book for children has been illustrated so frequently" (Morgan). Hodnett describes Barlow's vivacious drawings as "the special glory of the Aesop illustrations" and affirms "no artist has responded with more sensitivity and less sentimentality to the gentle grace of deer ... The least of creatures, the frog, the hare, the snake, and the swallow, and the least favoured of them, the ass, the boar and the wolf—he draws them all with an intimacy, charm, and inviolable integrity never surpassed in an English book, never by Thomas Bewick, for instance" (Hodnett). Wing A-696 (see ESTC R477463 for note on issue points); Morgan, Early Children's Books 9; see Darton, Children's Books In England pp. 14-15; Hodnett, Francis Barlow: First Master of English Book Illustration, London, 1978, p. 167 ff; Phillip Hofer, "Francis Barlow's Aesop" Harvard Library Bulletin (1948) 11:289.

Folio (349 x 223mm). Engraved additional title (dated 1665), full-page engraved illustration, and 110 etched vignettes with verses etched on the plates, all by and after Francis Barlow (a few small closed marginal tears). Contemporary ruled calf (neatly rebacked to style, endpapers renewed).