1868 Scarce Color ED - The Travels and Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen
This book has been sold, but we regularly acquire comparable copies.
An exceptionally attractive 1868 edition of Baron Munchausen’s fantastical adventures, preserved in its richly gilt original cloth and distinguished by the scarce fully colored suite of twenty-two full-page engravings.
Author: Rudolf Erich Raspe. Woodcuts by George Cruikshank.
Title: The Travels and Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Illustrated with Five Woodcuts by G. Cruikshank, and Twenty-Two Full-Page Curious Engravings.
Publisher: London: William Tegg, 1868.
Edition: 1868 illustrated edition. Scarce fully colored issue/state.
Language: English.
Pages: xvi, 268 pages, followed by publisher’s catalogue.
Size: 7.5 x 5 inches.
Binding: Very good original green cloth binding, elaborately decorated in gilt and black to the front board with a portrait of Baron Munchausen, balloons, flags and ornamental borders; gilt lettering and decoration to the spine and blind-stamped decoration to the rear board. All edges gilt. Light expected rubbing and wear, particularly at the extremities, but remarkably bright and attractive overall, as shown. Protected in a removable mylar cover.
Content: Very good content, complete, tight and well preserved. Original brown coated endpapers. An exceptionally clean copy.
Illustrations: A particularly desirable fully colored copy. Complete with the striking color portrait frontispiece of Baron Munchausen, protected by its original tissue guard, twenty-two full-page engravings all presented in color, including impressive folding or double-page compositions, together with five woodcuts by George Cruikshank and numerous decorative headpieces, tailpieces and initials. Copies of this edition are commonly encountered with only the frontispiece colored and the remaining plates uncolored, making this complete colored suite especially noteworthy.
Estimate: USD 400–500.
The book:
The Travels and Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen belongs to one of the great traditions of fantastical storytelling. The Baron recounts his impossible exploits with complete seriousness: extraordinary hunts, voyages to distant lands, encounters with fabulous creatures, flights through the air and feats in which ordinary physical laws are cheerfully ignored. The stories combine parody, satire and extravagant imagination, and the character of Munchausen became so enduring that his name entered popular culture as a synonym for spectacularly improbable storytelling.
This 1868 William Tegg edition is particularly appealing as a Victorian illustrated interpretation of the work. Its elaborate pictorial cloth binding, gilt edges, Cruikshank woodcuts and extensive suite of curious engravings make it a highly decorative production. The present copy is especially striking because the entire suite of twenty-two full-page plates appears in color, rather than the more frequently encountered configuration in which only the portrait frontispiece is hand colored.
The author:
Rudolf Erich Raspe (1736–1794) was a German scholar, librarian, scientist and writer whose varied career took him through intellectual circles in Germany and Britain. In 1785 he anonymously published the earliest English collection of tales associated with Baron Munchausen, drawing upon stories attributed to the real Hieronymus Karl Friedrich von Münchhausen, a German nobleman known for entertaining guests with extraordinary accounts of his military and hunting adventures.
The book rapidly developed through new editions and additions, becoming one of the enduring comic fantasies of European literature. George Cruikshank (1792–1878), one of the nineteenth century’s most celebrated British illustrators and caricaturists, contributed five woodcuts to this edition, adding another important name to the long visual history of the Baron’s extravagant adventures.