Orlando Furioso Di Ariosto. With Memoirs and Notes by Antonio Panizzi

London: William Pickering, 1834. First Panizzi edition of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, issued in four volumes by William Pickering in 1834, from the celebrated library of Frances Mary Richardson Currer. Set during the Saracen invasion of France, Orlando Furioso (1516-1532) follows the adventures of Charlemagne’s high-strung knight Orlando, who goes mad for love. Ariosto’s comic epic was hugely influential, going on to inspire works as various as The Faerie Queene, Much Ado About Nothing, Don Quixote, and Don Juan. Pickering issued this set as a companion to Panizzi’s 1830 edition of Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato. It was Pickering’s practice to keep his books in sheets and bind them over time: the morocco-grain cloth used on this set likely dates from slightly later in the nineteenth century. This copy of Orlando Furioso contains the bookplates and purchaser’s note of Yorkshire coal heiress Frances Mary Richardson Currer (1785-1861), who built a celebrated library of some 20,000 volumes. Contemporaries praised Currer’s scholarship and taste, as well as the rigorous organization and “choice condition” of her books. The bibliographer Thomas Frognall Dibdin called her a “book-genius,” and remarked of her library: “The ‘Collections’ are nearly perfect.” In 1820, and again in 1833, Currer issued a catalogue of her holdings, widely viewed as “the model catalogue of a private library” (DNB), and sent copies to book collectors across England and Europe, including members of the newly formed Roxburghe Club, quietly asserting her place among them. Also known for her commitment to charitable causes, Currer is obliquely noted as a “wealthy lady, in the West Riding of Yorkshire” who paid off the debts of a new widower, Patrick Brontë; scholars speculate that Charlotte Brontë’s unusual pen name, Currer Bell, is a tribute to Frances Currer. Text in Italian. See Keynes, William Pickering, Publisher. A near-fine copy, in the publisher’s cloth, with excellent bibliophilic provenance. Four octavo volumes, measuring 7.5 x 4.5 inches: [vii]-viii, clxxvi, 198; [4], 436; [4], 424; [4], 330, 79, [1]. Original publisher’s morocco-grain plum cloth, printed paper spine labels, text uncut and partially unopened. Woodcut frontispiece portrait after Titian; woodcut publisher’s device to title pages. Bookplates of Frances Mary Richardson Currer and John Porter; Porter’s Pickering collection label to rear pastedown of Volume I. Ink note in Currer’s hand to verso of front free endpaper of Volume I: “Russell Smith – 13s: 6d.” Spines sunned and slightly bubbled, light scattered foxing. Housed in later green card slipcases.