Gargantua & Pantagruel by François Rabelais - 1978

VERY GOOD — BOARDS: Very good condition. No issues. BOOK: Very good condition. Very light foxing to textblock head; light scratches/gilt loss to foredge page ends. Please inspect photos closely for condition details. If you have questions, please ask.

This text was featured by The Franklin Library in The 100 Greatest Books of All Time series. Published as a Limited Edition in 1978, bound in handsome Red leather, and beautifully illustrated by Walter Brooks, this edition would be a worthy addendum to your collectibles library.

All Franklin Library genuine full-leather editions feature:

• Full genuine leather binding.
  22k. gold lettering and stampings on the spine and covers.
  Attached silk page marker.
  High quality paper.
  Pages that are sewn not glued into the binding.
  Gold gilded page edges on all three sides.
  Raised spine bands that give each book that distinctive antique look.

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"The dazzling and exuberant moral stories of Rabelais (c. 1471-1553) expose human follies with their mischievous and often obscene humour, while intertwining the realistic with carnivalesque fantasy to make us look afresh at the world. Gargantua depicts a young giant, reduced to laughable insanity by an education at the hands of paternal ignorance, old crones and syphilitic professors, who is rescued and turned into a cultured Christian knight. And in Pantagruel and its three sequels, Rabelais parodied tall tales of chivalry and satirized the law, theology and academia to portray the bookish son of Gargantua who becomes a Renaissance Socrates, divinely guided in his wisdom, and his idiotic, self-loving companion Panurge."

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François Rabelais (born between 1483 and 1494; died 1553), has been called the first great French prose author. A humanist of the French Renaissance and Greek scholar, he offended both John Calvin and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Though in his day he was best known as a physician, scholar, and diplomat, later he became better known as a satirist, for his depictions of the grotesque, and for his larger-than-life characters.

Both Ecclesiastical and anticlerical, Christian and a free thinker, a doctor and a bon vivant, the multiple facets of his personality sometimes seem contradictory. Caught up in the religious and political turmoil of the Reformation, Rabelais treated the great questions of his time in his novels. Assessments of his life and work have evolved over time depending on dominant paradigms of thought.

. . . Rabelais is widely known for the first two volumes relating the childhoods of the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel written in the style of bildungsroman, his later works—the Third Book (which prefigures the philosophical novel) and the Fourth Book are considerably more erudite in tone.

His literary legacy is such that the word Rabelaisian designates something that is "marked by gross robust humor, extravagance of caricature, or bold naturalism".

The above text was taken from, respectively, Penguin publishers (via Google Books) and Wikipedia.
[Rabelais, Francois. Gargantua and Pantagruel. United Kingdom: Penguin Books Limited, 2006.]