In Folio: Rare Volumes in the Stanford University Libraries

HOMER.

Homer His Odysses Translated, Adorn'd with Sculpture, and Illustrated with Annotations, by John Ogilby ….

London: Printed by Thomas Roycroft, 1665.

This translation was undertaken by John Ogilby, a remarkable figure of seventeenth-century England. A successful dance master, his dancing career was ended by a fall. Appointed Master of the Revels in Ireland, Ogilby managed a very successful theater in Dublin until 1641, when the theater burned down. He returned to England, surviving shipwreck en route. Penniless, he made his way to Cambridge and began working on translations of Virgil, Aesop, and Homer.

Done in rhyming couplets, this translation of Homer is esteemed more for its illustrations than for its text. The illustrations were done by Wenceslaus Hollar (1607-1677), one of the finest illustrators of English books in the seventeenth century. Each of the plates is graced with the name and coat of arms of a member of the aristocracy, paid for in advance of printing, thereby furnishing Ogilby with capital with which to publish. This was an innovation of Ogilby’s that became a commonplace later in the century and on into the eighteenth century (used by Jacob Tonson, for example, in his 1717 folio edition of Ovid). Most of Ogilby’s books were destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, after which Ogilby began surveying London preparatory to rebuilding, which led to his final career as "His Majesty's Cosmographer and Geographick Printer." He began to issue travel books of England and Wales and books about foreign lands, all issued with maps. These works, as so many others of Ogliby’s, enjoyed a great popularity; his maps remain fascinating to this day.

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