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Show more"Boccaccio, Dante and Petrarch are the triumvirate who in the brilliant fourteenth century, ushered in the Renaissance and founded modern literature. "Boccaccio" to quote Symonds, "was the first to substitute a literature of the people for the literature of the learned classes and the aristocracy,... he delineated the world as he found it". The hundred stories in The Decameron are told by seven young ladies and three-gentlemen while taking refuge from a plague which raged in Florence in the year 1348. They are enclosed in a clever framework. On each of ten successive days, one of the story tellers is appointed king or queen, and under his or her direction each member contributes his narrative, one frequently suggesting the next. These stories in The Decameron, written between the years 1348-1358, cover every phase of human life- the pathetic, the humorous, the base and the noble. Certain of the stories were later retold by Chaucer, other by Lessing, Longfellow and Tennyson. Many other writers come under the spell of Boccaccio, the consummate narrator. The Ashendene Press, perhaps the greatest private press of all time, was founded in 1894 by St. John Hornby and occupied the leisure time of this busy man for forty years. It followed a middle course between the decorative magnificence of Morris' Kelmscott Press and the classic severity of Cobden Sanderson's Doves Press. The type used in this work is "Subiaco" and is based on the type face used by Sweynheym and Pannartz at Subiaco, Italy, in 1465. This large folio, which was in process of printing for seven years, is considered one of the great achievements of the Ashendene Press." (Ege, Otto F.)
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Otto F. Ege Collection
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Show more"Francesco Petrarch, 1304-74, as the 'first modern man', inaugurated the Renaissance. Symonds states that in Petrarch ' . . . the particular is superseded by the universal . . . the citizen is sunk in the man . . . his language has lost all traces of the dialect, and his verse fixes the poetic diction for all time in Italy.' This volume of seven-hundred sonnets and canzoni reveals the idealized love of the poet for Laura over a period of forty years and forms ' . . . one of the most splendid bodies of amorous verse in all literature . . . remarkable for exquisiteness and finish'. 'What little I am, such as it is,' the poet said, 'I am through her.' Petrarch's writings gave 'dignity and importance to living this side of the grave '. Petrarch, Dante and Boccaccio are considered the three 'fountains' of Italian literature, although Petrarch judged his Latin writings more important than these immortal sonnets written in Italian" "Gabriel Giolito, the most prolific printer in Italy during the sixteenth century, printed about eight-hundred and fifty books from the date of founding his press in 1539 to his in 1578. In the first twenty-one years, before 1560, twenty-two editions of Petrarch's poems bore his imprint. Giolito also exercised great influence on his contemporaries and successors in the form of and decoration of books, especially of title pages" (Ege, Otto F.)
Original Leaves from Famous Books
Otto F. Ege Collection
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