Candide or Optimism by Francoise Marie Arouet De Voltaire - 1978

Independently published, 2020, 2020. Hardcover. As New/No Jacket. Royal octavo, softcover, as new in blue and red pictorial wraps. , First published in 1759 in France, 96 pages, 30 short chapters. Voltaire was born in Paris. Jesuit-educated, he began writing clever verses by the age of 12. He launched a lifelong, successful playwriting career in 1718, interrupted by imprisonment in the Bastille. Upon a second imprisonment, in which Francois adopted the pen name Voltaire, he was released after agreeing to move to London. There he wrote Lettres philosophiques (1733), which galvanized French reform.

New York: The Literary Guild, 1929., 1929. Hardcover. Very Good/No Jacket. Rockwell Kent. Quarto, hardcover, Decorative blue cloth with silver stars and lettering on cover. spine sunned else VG. No dj. No marks or writing. Pages beginning to tan at edges. Introduction by Charles Merrill, 1929. 112 pp., First published in 1759 in France, and published by Random House in 1928 in English with Kent's illustrations reproduced here. Includes Crofts Classics laid in, edited by Torrey, 115 pp.

GB: C. Davis, 1732. New leather spine with 5 raised bands and burgundy title label and (?original) marbled boards. Frontispiece. Text is fairly clean and tight. A few slight damp marks to bottom right corner of a few apparently random leaves (?original paper fault). Edges of boards scuffed and covers worn but clean. . 1st Edition. Hardback. G++/No Dw.

London, Printed for D. Davis..., 1732. FIRST EDITION. Large 8vo, 212 x 135 mms., pp. vi, [20], 311 [312 note], title-page in red and black, engraved frontispiece, uncut, late 18th century calf, sympathetically rebacked, morocco label; a very good copy with the inscription "Jas. Bonar/ 1791" on the top margin of the title-page, and the 20th century bookplate of Ray Livingstone Murphy on the front paste-down end-paper. Voltaire dedicated this long poem on the life of the French King, Henri IV to Queen Caroline, and it was published in French in 1728. It was translated into English by John Lockman (1698 - 1771), and this apparently earned him the sobriquet "l'illustre Lockman" in France, a fact that Dr. Johnson, according to Boswell, found irritating and ridiculous. The translation, in blank verse, is accompanied by a large number of notes, almost all of an anti-Catholic hue. Foxon L 215.