The New Ellesmere Chaucer Facsimile

Category: Literature
Format: 484 pages, 12 x 17-1/2, illus., cloth
Release Date: 1996-01-01
ISBN: 978-0-87328-162-1

Price: $275.00

About this Book
The Ellesmere manuscript of The Canterbury Tales is the most famous literary treasure in the Huntington Library's collections. The manuscript's 464 text pages are embellished with floriated borders, illuminated initials, and other decorations, as well as twenty-three portraits of the pilgrim-storytellers. In 1995, the Huntington Library and the Yushodo Co., Ltd., of Japan produced a full-scale, full-color facsimile of this manuscript still available in two formats. The second format, sewn and bound in an early fifteenth-century-type binding, oak boards and quarter brown leather, contained in a quarter-leather and Ellesmere blue-linen-covered box, is available for $16,000 per copy. Copies in unsewn quires and stored in an Ellesmere blue linen-covered box are $8,000 each.

The Ellesmere Chaucer Monochromatic Facsimile

The transparencies that were the basis of the landmark color facsimile were used to make a full-sized, monochromatic facsimile. Elegantly printed by the Stinehour Press of Lunenberg, Vermont, the facsimile conveys the trim, texture, and decoration of the original manuscript pages. It features a color frontispiece, the page that begins the Knight's Tale. Both facsimiles were edited by Daniel Woodward and Martin Stevens.