Caption: "Boccaccio, The Decameron, 'The whole book glows with the joyousness of a race . . .' - Symonds, printed by The Ashendene Press, Chelsea, 1920. Boccaccio, Dante, and Petrarch are the triumvirate who, in the brilliant fourteenth century, ushered in the Renaissance and founded modern literature. 'Boccaccio,' to quote Symonds, 'was the first to substitute a literature of the people for the literature of the learned classes and the aristocracy, . . . he delineated the world as he found it.' The hundred stories in The Decameron are told by seven young ladies and three gentlemen while taking refuge from a plague which raged in Florence in the year 1348. They are enclosed in a clever framework. On each of ten successive days, one of the story tellers is appointed king or queen, and under his or her direction each member contributes his narrative, one frequently suggesting the next. These stories in The Decameron, written between the years 1348-1358, cover every phase of human life-the pathetic, the humorous, the base, and the noble. Certain of the stories were later retold by Chaucer, others by Lessing, Longfellow, and Tennyson. Many other writers came under the spell of Boccaccio, the consummate narrator. The Ashendene Press, perhaps the greatest private press of all time, was founded in 1894 by St. John Hornby and occupied the leisure time of this busy man for forty years. It followed a middle course between the decorative magnificence of Morris’ Kelmscott Press and the classic severity of Cobden Sanderson’s Doves Press. The type used in this work in ‘Subiaco’ and is based on the type face used by Sweynheym and Pannartz at Subiaco, Italy in 1465. This large folio, which was in the process of printing for seven years, is considered one of the great achievements of the Ashendene Press.”
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