The Italian Novelists. Now First Translated Into English. Choicely Illustrated By E. R. Hughes. in Seven Volumes by Waters, W. G. (Trans.). Straparola, Giovanni Francesco; Fiorentino, Giovanni - 1901

London: Privately Printed for Members of the Society of Bibliophiles,, 1901. Book. Illus. by E.R. Hughes. Good. Hardcover. Limited Edition. Seven volumes. Complete. ----- Plates by E.R. Hughes, in three states. All red-lettered tissue-guarded. [Three copies of each plate, one of which is in color]. Each book with a hand-colored frontispiece. ----- Original red half morocco and marbled boards, Spines titles/decorated in gilt, All edges gilt. ---- Copy 'H' of 26 lettered copies, the St. Mark's Edition, printed on Japanese Vellum paper. ---- Includes "The Facetious Nights of Straporola" and "The Pecorone of Ser Giovanni". ---- I: 'The Facetious Nights of Straporola' xii, 402 pages. II: 'The Facetious Nights of Straporola' (376 pages. III: 'The Facetious Nights of Straparola' 404 pages. IV: 'The Facetious Nights of Straparola' 318 pages. V: 'The Pecorone of Ser Giovanni' xi, 278 pages. VI: 'The Pecorone of Ser Giovanni' 323 pages. VII: 'The Pecorone of Ser Giovanni' 329 pages. --- Bindings are firm and square. Text clean with moderate even toning. Bookplate on paste-down of each. Corners are rubbed and spine bands have wear. Loss lower spine volume 1 and 7. Volume 7 has lost label. Volume one rubbed along left edge of spine. ------ Giovanni Francesco "Gianfrancesco" Straparola (ca. 1480Â-ca. 1557) was an Italian writer and fairy tale collector from Caravaggio, Italy. He has been termed the progenitor of the literary form of the fairy tale. Charles Perrault borrowed most of his stories from Giovanni Francesco Straparola and Giambattista Basile. Straparola's main work is a two-volume collection, "Le piacevoli notti" (published in English as "The Nights of Straparola" or "The Facetious Nights of Straparola"), with 75 stories. Modeled on Decamerone, it has participants of a 13-night party on the island of Murano, near Venice, tell each other stories that vary from bawdy to fantastic. It contains the first known written versions of many fairy tales. ---- The Ser Giovanni (14th century) work is a collection of 50 comic, tragic and licentious novellas. Contains elements later found in Shakespeare including the bond with a Jew for a pound of flesh and the wooing of a lady at Belmont. -------- For Waters' Victorian readers, some Straparola's fairy tales and riddles tested the limits of propriety, while other more realistic tales were judged to be scandalously lascivious. For this reason, Waters chose to translate the most licentious passages of the latter into French, rather than English. Tellingly, Waters' translation would be re-published in 1906 by one of the most infamous pornographers of the early 20th-century, Charles Carrington, who openly marketed the tales as erotica. .