Quarto. In two volumes. [4], xxxvii, [3], 280; [2], 340pp. With 52 woodcut vignettes. Exquisitely bound in beautifully gilt- and blind-tooled near contemporary black morocco; with five sets of double raised bands to spine, a gilt fillet encloses an elaborate blind- stamped design, A.E.G. brown silk moire endpapers. With the lightest of shelf-wear, corners a trifle bumped, else a fine set. Circular book labels of Eric Gerald Stanley to verso of FFEP in each volume.

'The authors of the Cento Novelle Antiche, Boccace, Bandello, Chaucer, Gower, in short the writers of all Europe, have probably made use of the inventions of the elder fablers. They have borrowed their general outlines, which they have filled up with colours of their own, and have exercised their ingenuity in varying the drapery, in combining the groups, and in forming them into more regular and animated pictures'.

A choice copy of the true first editions of both volumes of the beautifully presented English metrical translation of French antiquarian Pierre Jean-Baptiste Legrand d'Aussy's (1737-1800) Fabliaux ou Contes des douzième et treizième siècles (Paris, 1781), a collection of twenty five tales from medieval French troubadours 'consequently anterior to our English historical ballads and metrical romances, of which they are probably the originals'.

The publication's history was beset by difficulty; the translation was executed, as noted to the title of the second volume, by Gregory Lewis Way (1756-1799). However, he died before the publication of the second volume. It was therefore seen through the press, with an extensive introduction, notes and an appendix, by English poet and antiquarian George Ellis (1753-1815), better known for his later - and more successful - Specimens of Early English Metrical Romances (London, 1805). The work is better known, however, for its woodcut illustrations; it contains some of the final work of John Bewick (1760-1795), who was commissioned for the complete work, but died after cutting just 'four sets of head and tailpieces for volume one' (Tattersfield). The cutting work was completed by Charlton Nesbit in London, and in the workshop of his brother, Thomas - with four sets of head and tailpieces executed by his apprentice Luke Clennell.

Bulmer's efforts were rewarded critically, if not commercially (although the work did reach a second edition, in three octavo volumes, in 1815). The British Critic, for example, noted on publication of the first volume, that 'The volume...is beautiful in its form, as well as pleasing in its contents. The typography belongs to the first class of Bulmerian work, and the vignette ornaments are aptly formed on subjects relative to the history of chivalry, and executed on wood by the Bewicks, the younger of whom unfortunately died while this work was preparing for the press'.

Provenance: From the recently dispersed library of Eric Gerald Stanley (1923-2018), scholar of Old English literature, Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford.