Samuel Croxall Croxall’s Aesop The Fifth Edition, 1747 (1722), Printed for J. and R. Tonson, and

The Fifth Edition, 1747 (1722), Printed for J. and R. Tonson, and J. Watts, London. 18mo,10 x 16.5cm; A6,[18] 345pp, [7]. Full leather with 6 panels and gilt title on burgundy to spine Dedication to George, Lord Viscount Sunbury, Baron Halifax; Preface, Contents, Aesops’ Fables, Index. Frontispiece, chapter headings and endings and first line illustrations, and fine fable illustrations throughout from cuts by Elisha Kirkall.

‘Croxall spends some three and a half pages of his Preface calumniating L'Estrange's edition of the fables  as much for the fact of him being "a Tool and Hireling of the Popish Faction" as for the voluminous bulk and the exorbitant price of his edition. However, Croxall has none of the literary felicity of his predecessor and both his fable retellings and his "Applications" are long-winded. Nonetheless his version was to be reprinted for over a hundred years, a popularity for which its illustrations were responsible. These were engravings by Elisha Kirkall, who succeeded in conveying to a popular readership finely-made but much reduced copies of the earlier Gheeraerts - Cleyn - Barlow images.’

Linton in his Masters of Wood Engraving praised this Croxall Edition of Aesop’s Fables as being “our first English book with cuts of noticeable worth, a book in after time to revolutionize the whole method and process of engraving in wood. (...) This book is the fountain-head of the Bewick river and overflow. (...) Sixty years saw the Fables unrivaled." Bewick himself had pointed to the seminal example of the illustrated Croxall edition in his preface to his Fables. He took the noted copper engraver Elisha Kirkall or his apprentice John Baptist Jackson for the author of the cuts and assumed the material had not been wood, but a soft, lead-like metal. Linton questioned the authorship of Jackson, who later became famous for his chiaroscuro woodcuts, out of biographical reasons, and he stresses the significance of Kirkhall. He even takes Kirkhall for the supposable founder of the white-line technique, the very mode of engraving which had helped to establish Bewick’s fame.

Condition: Front board disbound and leather heavily scuffed with chips on spine. Text block sound and tight with age toning and intermittent foxing. Cuts clear and bright.