Callipædia: or, the Art of Getting Pretty Children. QUILLET (Claude).

Callipædia: or, the Art of Getting Pretty Children. In Four Books. Translated from the Original Latin of Claudius Quilletus. By several Hands.

Woodcut head and tail pieces and initials.

First Edition. 8vo. [163 x 98 x 15 mm]. [8]ff, 72, [8] pp. Bound in contemporary sprinkled calf, the covers with a blind double fillet border and blind triple fillet panel with a flower-head in the outer corners, the spine divided into five panels with raised bands, the edges of the boards tooled with a gilt roll, plain endleaves and edges. (Joints slightly cracked but firm).
London: printed for Bernard Lintott at the Cross Keys between the Two Temple-Gates in Fleetstreet, 1710

A fine copy. With a bookseller's catalogue note tipped inside the front cover.

Some copies have a frontispiece and four plates, but the three at the British Library do not, and Foxon (O142) explained: "they were perhaps not ready when the poem was published."

Originally published in Leiden in 1655, and first published in London in Latin in 1709. This is the first edition, and perhaps the first English edition, of William Oldisworth's (and "several Hands") translation published in the same year as the anonymous English version issued by Morphew, with whom Lintot was competing. In 1712 Curll brought out Nicholas Rowe's translation.

Stock no. ebc7643