1855 Nice Bayntun Binding - The Heptameron of Margaret, Queen of Navarre.
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Author: Margaret, Queen of Navarre. With a Memoir of the Author By Walter K. Kelly.
Title: The Heptameron of Margaret, Queen of Navarre, With a Memoir of the Author.
Publisher: London: Henry G. Bohn, 1855.
Language: Text in English.
Size : 7 " X 5 ".
Pages: xliv-423 pages.
Binding: Attractive and near fine half leather binding, finely bound by Bayntun in red morocco for Charles E. Lauriat Company, title in gilt on spine, gilt top edge. Under a protective removable mylar cover.
Content: Very good content (bright, tight, and clean, endpaper slightly toned - as shown).
Illustrations: Complete with the frontispiece portrait of Margaret, Queen of Navarre.
The book: Nice and attractive edition of The Heptameron -- a collection of 72 short stories written in French by Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549), published posthumously in 1558. It has the form of a frame narrative and was inspired by The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio. It was originally intended to contain one hundred stories covering ten days like The Decameron, but at Marguerite’s death it was completed only as far as the second story of the eighth day. Many of the stories deal with love, lust, infidelity, and other romantic and sexual matters. One was based on the life of Marguerite de La Rocque, a French noblewoman who was punished by being abandoned with her lover on an island off Quebec.
The author: Marguerite de Navarre (French: Marguerite d'Angoulême, Marguerite d'Alençon; 11 April 1492 – 21 December 1549), also known as Marguerite of Angoulême and Margaret of Navarre, was the princess of France, Queen of Navarre, and Duchess of Alençon and Berry. She was married to Henry II of Navarre. Her brother became King of France, as Francis I, and the two siblings were responsible for the celebrated intellectual and cultural court and salons of their day in France. Marguerite is the ancestress of the Bourbon kings of France, being the mother of Jeanne d'Albret, whose son, Henry of Navarre, succeeded as Henry IV of France, the first Bourbon king. As an author and a patron of humanists and reformers, she was an outstanding figure of the French Renaissance. Samuel Putnam called her "The First Modern Woman".
The Binder: George Bayntun (4 August 1873 - September 1940) was an English bookseller, bookbinder, and collector. George Bayntun was born and lived in Bath, Somerset, England where he served a book-binding apprenticeship before starting his own book-binding business in Northumberland Place in 1894. He took on a number of London binders in order to raise the standard of craftsmanship in his own bindery and soon afterward moved the business into larger premises on Walcot Street in Bath. In 1920, he purchased the bindery business of George Gregory, and in 1939, the Bayntun and Rivière binderies were incorporated into a new set of premises on Manvers Street in Bath, from where the business still operates today.