Novel Relics
The Story of the Odyssey — Rev. Alfred J. Church | Seeley & Co. 1892 | First Edition | 16 Colour Plates after Flaxman | Decorated Cloth
The Story of the Odyssey — Rev. Alfred J. Church | Seeley & Co. 1892 | First Edition | 16 Colour Plates after Flaxman | Decorated Cloth
Or spread the cost with Klarna — pay in 3 interest-free instalments of £9.33.
No hidden fees when you pay on time.
Available at checkout — subject to status. Learn more
Couldn't load pickup availability
Homer, retold for Victorian children, and illustrated like a Greek vase.
Alfred Church was a clergyman and Professor of Latin at University College London who spent the back half of his life doing something rather generous: making the classics readable for people who hadn't been beaten through them at school. This is his Odyssey, published by Seeley in 1892 and reviewed in The Classical Review that same May — the first edition, alongside its companion volume on the Iliad.
The illustrations are what make it. They are taken after John Flaxman, the great neoclassical draughtsman, and printed here as pale terracotta figures against solid black, in deliberate imitation of Greek red-figure vase painting. Nestor's sacrifice, Ulysses preparing to fight with Irus, the whole voyage rendered in clean outline. They look like nothing else on a shelf and they have aged far better than most Victorian book illustration.
The binding is publisher's brick-red cloth, blocked in gilt with a Flaxman chariot scene on the front board and a laurel-wreathed portrait of Homer beneath it, with a small gilt lyre on the spine. Solid, handsome, unmistakably of its decade.
Condition. Honest and well-read. The spine ends are frayed with some loss at the head, the cloth is rubbed along the edges and at the corners, and there is a dark stain and some scattered marks to the rear board. Internally toned with light foxing. One plate — Ulysses preparing to fight with Irus — has come loose from the binding and sits free in the book. It is present, clean and undamaged, but it is detached, and we would rather you knew that before ordering than after opening the parcel. The remaining plates are secure and the text block is sound.
A lovely reading copy of a genuinely beautiful piece of Victorian book-making, priced for its faults.
One of a kind — when it's gone, it's gone.
Free UK delivery. Hand-wrapped in stiff card and packing paper.
Share
