Early English Printing. [The Kalender of Shepherdes (sic)], ...

Hammer

£900

Early English Printing. [The Kalender of Shepherdes (sic)], a series of 24 woodcuts, (15.1 x 12.8cm), incorporating the Signs of the Zodiac, s.l. [?London], s.n., n.d., probably facsimiles taken from an early English edition of an almanac first published in French in 1493 by Guy Marchant as Le compost et Kalendrier des bergiers, trimmed to the black-ruled margin, Gothic Black Letter to verso, mounted two to a leaf, browned, collected and bound in 19th c tan morocco, chipped and split, upper-cover lettered in gilt: The Shepherd's Kalendar (sic), 1580, blind-ruled borders, 4to

The binding's attribution to the 1580 Elizabethan narrative poem is erroneous: neither the type employed nor the illustrations in our series of prints conform to that title, itself Edmund Spenser's first major poetic work.

These woodcuts closely accord with the illustrations in a 1500 French edition of the Compost (Bodleian Library, Oxford, Douce 161), but differ from those in an English edition of 1556. However, the text on the verso of a conforming set of 12 woodcuts in the Royal Collection (RCIN 809372), to which ours also conform in part (here we have 24 rather than 12), is in English.