Lot 68: POPE, Alexander (1688-1744) -- HOMER. The Iliads and Odysses, translated by Thomas Hobbes

POPE, Alexander (1688-1744) -- HOMER. The Iliads and Odysses, translated by Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). London: Will. Crook, 1686.

12° (151 x 181mm). Engraved frontispiece. (Frontispiece window-mounted, Odyssey bound before the Iliad with contents leaves between, some headlines cropped with slight loss, K2 of Odyssey with small marginal repair, B11 of Iliad soiled at margin, D9 with paper fault, K7r weakly impressed.) Late 19th-century brown morocco, gilt edges, solander case. Provenance: Alexander Pope (ownership inscription, 'A. Pope ejus Liber,' on front blank and brief occasional notes to the Iliad in his hand -- James Cowan (bookplate) -- John Gribbel (bookplate), sold Parke-Bernet, New York, 8 May 1945, lot 437, for $95 (£23 15s). Exhibited: Grolier Club (1950s exhibition label loosely inserted).

ALEXANDER POPE'S COPY OF THE THIRD EDITION, WITH HIS PREVIOUSLY UNRECORDED NOTES. Pope read Ogilby's translation of Homer in folio at the age of about eight. In Collected in Himself, Appendix A, Mack lists 7 surviving editions from his library, including George Chapman's translation in a 1611 folio, and the present verse translation by Hobbes in which Pope, who 'was anything but a prolific annotator while reading,' has made short notes to the Iliad on pp. 71-72, 75, 193, 246, 249-50, 252-53, 272, 310, 313, 326 and 338. He marks where the story of Sarpedon begins and ends, writes the comment 'Desinent Omnia' against the line 'Leaving his Limbs, his Soul bewailing flew' (p. 338), and makes orthographical corrections; some notes are severely cropped by the binder. There is also scoring to lines of the Odyssey (pp. 37, 48) and on some dozen pages of the Iliad. That Pope made special note of the beginning and end of the Sarpedon story may help date his ownership of this copy since the first fragement of his own translation of Homer was 'The Episode of Sarpedon, translated from the Twelfth and Sixteenth Books of Homer's Iliads,' published in Jacob Tonson's Poetical Miscellanies, Sixth Part on 2 May, 1709, when he was still under twenty-one. Macdonald and Hargreaves 81; Mack 86, known only through the Gribbel sale catalogue; Wing H-2552.

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