Odaria Anakreontos = Odes d’Anacreon

Paris: Ambroise Firmin-Didot, 1864. Hardcover. Near Fine. 24mo (140 x 85mm). Pagination: [iii]-xlvii, 158pp. (including table). Signatures: a(6), b-4(4),1-20(4, including final blank). Title printed with engraved border of muses and signed by engravers “H. Catenacci” - Hercules Louis Catenacci (1816–1884) and “A. F. Lemaitre” - Augustin Francois Lemaitre (1797–1870). 54 photolithograph plates of Girodet’s compositions illustrating the odes with fine classical figures and settings. Greek text with French prose translation for 64 odes by Ambrose Firmin-Didot. Text printed within red ruled borders withheadings printed in red. Finely bound in a French 19th-century crimson morocco, covers gilt with central ornament, spine with five raised bands, lettered in gilt: ODES D’ANACREON / F. DIDOT 1864, inner gilt dentelles, marbled endpapers, edges gilt, custom cloth case; (onlyslightest wave to a few leaves, otherwise a very good and attractive copy). Front pastedown with the typographic bookplate of Robert Percy Alden, an American Gilded Age lawyer and collector hailing from Pennsylvania, who died in 1909.

Fine French edition of the Odes of Anacreon edited and produced by Ambroise Firmin-Didot (1790–1876), reusing the illustrations, in a reduced scale, by the French artist “Girodet” [Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson (1767–1824)]. Girodet’s graceful, neoclassic designswere executed in the revived “Second Empire” style and engraved by his pupil Henri-Guillaume Chatillon (1780–1856). J. B. de Saint-Victor originally commissioned the Girodet illustrations in 1808, but only two complete designs were published with his translation in 1810. Girodet continued to work on the illustrations privately, as well ashis own translation of the ancient Greek Odes, until his death in 1824. Ambroise Firmin-Didot was an accomplished classicist, editor, and man of letters within the established line of Didot printers in Paris. This production is an outstanding example of one of the finely printed classics issuing from the renowned Didot press. It maintains the distinctive Didot typographic layout and refined use of red and black inks. The introductory text of a later English edition of the Odes (1869) by Thomas Moore, notes that the Firmin-Didot edition was sold at the almost “prohibitive price” of two pounds. Wonderful copy, most likely bound for Robert Percy Alden’s American villa-library in the late 19th century. Alden spent several of his Yale post-graduate years in Europe and was married in Paris in 1878, when he likelyprocured this book.