Milton, John
Paradise Lost
£3,024
Auction: 05 February 2025 from 10:00 GMT
Description
A Poem in Twelve Books. The Fourth Edition, Adorn'd with Sculptures. London: by Miles Flesher, for Richard Bently, and Jacob Tonson, 1688. Folio (32.5 x 19cm), [4] 343 [7] pp., contemporary calf, engraved portrait frontispiece, 12 engraved plates, list of subscribers at rear, engraved bookplates (Charles Sharp of Hoddom and Murray of Crieff), binding worn, front board and frontispiece detached, frontispiece with closed tear to foot and small chip to gutter affecting image, fraying to fore edges up to quire H, short closed tear to foot of plate for Book XI, small spill-burn in pp. 317/18 [Pforzheimer 720; Wing M2147]
Provenance
From the library of the Murrays of Dollerie, Crieff, Perthshire.
Footnote
First illustrated and first folio edition of one of the greatest poems in the English language, published in the year of the Glorious Revolution, an event which might be viewed as a posthumous fulfilment of Milton's life's work as one of the principal opponents of monarchical absolutism in the 17th century. 'The first three editions of Paradise Lost sold in modest numbers, but the fourth edition, a sumptuous gilt-edged folio published in 1688, was bought by subscription by many of the most influential readers in England, and thereafter the poem came to be widely regarded as England's national epic' (ODNB).