V is for…

Valuable

Title page of Cambrensis Eversvs (1662)

 

‘NB. I found this valuable book fast falling in pieces and almost destroyed by damp. I got it rebound and repaired as well as I could’ appears in the hand of Henry Cotton inside Cambrensis Eversvs, authored in exile by Galwayman John Lynch. It is believed that most copies of this work were destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666, rendering it a rare item even in its own time, and fewer than ten copies are known to survive today.

 

Voyages & Travels

Title page of The decades of the newe worlde or West India (1555)

 

We find in this translation a distillation of the oral and written reports given directly to the Royal Chronicler Pietro Martire d’Anghiera in the court of Spain by explorers returning from the ‘newe worlde’. Richard Eden’s translation is dedicated to the newlyweds Philip II of Spain and Mary I Queen of England, a union which couldn’t help but bring Spain’s ‘newe worlde’ directly to the attention of Mary’s subjects.