First edition, first issue of Pine's Horace: a particularly fine example of this masterpiece of book-design and 'remarkable enterprise in engraving' (DNB).

First edition, first issue of Pine's Horace: a particularly fine example of this masterpiece of book-design and 'remarkable enterprise in engraving' (DNB).

With every page fully engraved -- including not only the plates, portraits, vignettes, initials and other decorations, but all text too -- it is a tour-de-force of the art, and one of its most famous exemplars. This first issue is identified by having the uncorrected reading 'Post est' in the caption to the Caesar medallion on p.108 of the second volume (corrected in later issues to 'Potest'). The extensive lists of subscribers in each volume (variously 18 and 17 pp.) show the extent to which Pine must have publicised and pre-sold this extraordinary undertaking. There are separate listings for subscribers from Paris, Madrid, Vienna, and other places while Dublin subscribers include a sub-listing of subscribers from Trinity College. Oxford and Cambridge subscribers are also shown separately.

"Ouvrage très recherché…" ( Cohen-De Ricci). "Pine's complete command of his craft makes this the most elegant of English eighteenth-century books in which text and illustrations alike are entirely engraved"(Ray).

"John Pine (1690-1756) may well have been the pupil of Bernard Picart, the great French engraver at Amsterdam: he was the best English engraver in the first half of the [eighteenth] century. His edition of Horace is engraved throughout, text as well as ornament, though it is said that the text was first set in type and an impression transferred to the plate before it was engraved. The results are a unity between decoration and text which at times suggests Didot's Horace of 1799; a contrast between thick and thin strokes in the letters which naturally follows from the engraving process but which foreshadows the type design of Baskerville, Bodoni, and Didot; and the wide "leading" between the lines of the text which did so much to give their pages a brilliant effect" (Printing and the Mind of Man, Exhibition of Fine Printing, British Museum 1963, no.105).