Utopia: or the Happy Republic; - 1743

Glasgow: printed by Robert Foulis, and sold by him there; and, at Edinburgh, by Mess. Hamilton and Balfour Booksellers,, 1743. First Foulis edition of More's celebrated description of an ideal commonwealth, a "quintessential humanist dialogue" (ODNB), first published in Louvain in 1516. This edition used Bishop Burnet's translation, first published in 1685. The Foulis Press was renowned for the quality of its paper, typography, and book design, seen here in the attractive mezzotint frontispiece. Influenced by Plato's Republic, St Augustine's De civitate dei, Vespucci's accounts of the New World, and Erasmus's Institutio principis christiani, Utopia was "a tract for the times, to rub in the lesson of Erasmus; it inveighs against the new statemanship of all-powerful autocracy and the new economics of large enclosures and the destruction of the old common-field agriculture, just as it pleads for religious tolerance and universal education" (PMM). Octavo (168 x 101 mm). Contemporary sheep, red morocco label, gilt ornaments in compartments. Mezzotint frontispiece portrait by Samuel Taylor after Holbein (partly folding). Contemporary bookplate of the baronets Inglis of Cramond to the front pastedown beneath shelfmark "Calder House 7.E" and with inscription "Cramond" to title page; 20th-century bookplate of Francis Woodland Reader to the front free endpaper. Slight rubbing and minor wear to extremities, contents a little toned else clean. A very good copy. ESTC T85446, Gaskell 42; Printing and the Mind of Man 47 (for 1516 edition).