Droll Stories: Collected from The Abbeys of Touraine

Garden City: Garden City, 1942. hardcover. fair. Ralph Barton. Missing dust jacket. Beige cloth covered boards with gold botannical design on spine, and gold letters. Spine is somewhat darkened and gold is worn. Boards and spine are bumped. Front hinge is starting, webbing showing. Pages have no markings, but do have the occasional spot or fingerprint. Faint smoke smell. Illustrations are printed double sided on glossy paper and are tipped in. Garden City Publishing hard cover, missing dust jacket; 1942 edition, later printing (print code CL); 291 + 266 pages. Illustrated by Ralph Barton. 8vo (5.75"" x 8.5"") Edited by Ernest Boyd. This is an omnibus reprinting of a two volume edition originally printed by Liveright in 1928. French novelist and playwright Honor de Balzac (1799 -1850) was a founder of realism in European literature. An inspiration to Proust, Dickens, Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, and countless others, Balzac wrote works that were hailed for their multifaceted characters and exquisite attention to detail. This edition's excellent anonymous translation was the first to make Contes Drolatiques available to English-speaking readers. Balzac's Contes Drolatiques, published in three installments in the 1830s, offers a lively and lusty portrait of sixteenth-century French life and manners. These thirty stories in the tradition of Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Rabelais were claimed by the author to have originated in manuscripts from the abbeys of Touraine. Abounding in episodes of good-humored licentiousness, the tales scandalized Balzac's contemporaries and continue to delight modern readers.