8vo. 230pp. With facsimile reproduction of Whitney's emblem-book, including numerous in-text woodcut illustrations. Contemporary dark brown calf, richly tooled in gilt and blind. Very light wear to extremities. Internally clean and crisp.

A fine twentieth-century facsimile reproduction, produced by West Yorkshire's Scolar Press, of Elizabethan poet Geoffrey Whitney's (c.1548- c.1601) famous emblem-book, A Choice of Emblemes, considered the first English entry in the great continental tradition. A significant influence on Elizabethan literature, the text is posited to have introduced William Shakespeare to the works of the great European emblematists. Of the woodcut illustrations, 202 were chosen from the stock of Antwerp's Plantin Press, where Whitney's original two-part quarto was produced, 23 further can be traced to the work of others, and a final 23 are likely original.