Miguel de Cervantès

Beautifully bound copy of the 1780 edition of Don Quixote commissioned by the Royal Academy of Madrid as a grand national project, uniting Spain's greatest printer with the best engravers, artists and scholars to produce a deluxe definitive edition worthy of the founder of Spain's modern literature.

• Sold as a set of 4.
• Miguel de Cervantes (Spanish).
• El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de La Mancha compuesto por Miguel de Cervántes Saavedra. Nueva edicion corregida por la Real Academia Española.
• Madrid: Joaquin Ibarra, 1780.
• Includes engraved portrait of Cervantes, engraved frontispiece in each volume, folding map in volume I and 31 full-page engravings: complete (see Ruis 53).
• Bound in 19th-century full oxblood leather with gilt-tooled borders and spine, all edges marbled.

The Ibarra Quixote fulfilled its promises of neoclassical grandeur: supervised by Cervantes biographer Vicente de los Rios and Academy secretary Francisco Antonio de Angulo; printed on paper from the Catalonia mills of Joseph Florens in type designed by calligrapher Francisco Javier de Santiago y Palomares, cut and cast by Jerónimo Antonio Gil for the Biblioteca Real, and loaned to the Academia for this edition; illustrated with a historical map of La Mancha and engravings after Gil, José del Castillo, Antonio Carnicero, Bernardo Barranco, Jose Brunete and Gregorio Ferro. "[E]verything prophesied of this edition, or said about it on its completion, is true." (Updike).