Antique 1882 History of Greece Timayenis Complete 2 Vol Set Gilt Pictorial Cloth For Sale

ANCIENT GREECE, BEAUTIFULLY BOUND — COMPLETE 1882 TWO-VOLUME SET

Before Greece became the familiar landscape of museum galleries and history textbooks, its story had to be told: the rival cities, the armies crossing the Aegean, the philosophers arguing in Athens, the rise of Alexander, and the long centuries that followed. Open these books and you enter that story as a reader in the 1880s would have encountered it.

Offered here is the complete two-volume 1882 edition of T. T. Timayenis’s A History of Greece: From the Earliest Times to the Present, published in New York by D. Appleton and Company. Both volumes retain their matching burgundy cloth bindings, with gilt lettering, decorative borders, and striking portrait medallions on the front covers. Displayed together, they have the presence that makes nineteenth-century books such a pleasure to collect.

ABOUT THE WORK

Telemachus Thomas Timayenis set out to tell a broad history of Greece, reaching well beyond the celebrated age of Athens. His account carries the reader through the ancient Greek world and onward through later eras toward the Greece of his own century. The title pages call for maps and illustrations, and the photographed pages show the handsome engraved portrait of Constantine the Great facing the Volume I title page.

Timayenis wrote with particular interest in Greek sources and the Greek view of the country’s history. For today’s reader, these volumes offer two kinds of discovery at once: the sweep of Greece’s past and a revealing look at how that past was presented to an American audience in the late nineteenth century.

A CONNECTION TO THE CHAUTAUQUA MOVEMENT

The printed dedication names Rev. Dr. J. H. Vincent, president of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, and describes this work as a token of admiration for his efforts to promote popular education. This is a meaningful connection. Timayenis’s History of Greece appeared in contemporary Chautauqua reading programs, putting these volumes in the hands of people studying history together far beyond a university classroom.

Please note that this is a printed dedication, not a personally signed presentation copy to Vincent.

THE BOOKS THEMSELVES

• Complete matching set: Volumes I and II

• Author: T. T. Timayenis

• Publisher: D. Appleton and Company, New York

• Date on the photographed Volume I title page: 1882

• Original burgundy pictorial cloth with gilt and black decoration

• Portrait medallions on the front covers; gilt-lettered spines

• Decorated endpapers

• Title pages state “with maps and illustrations”

One volume also contains a later handwritten inscription in French, dated November 18, 1983, from “Maman” to her daughter. It is a personal trace from the books’ later life and is unrelated to the nineteenth-century printed dedication.

CONDITION

An attractive, well-matched antique set. The front-cover designs remain notably vivid, with strong decorative detail and pleasing gilt. Both books show age-appropriate rubbing and edge wear, including wear at the spine ends and corners. The page edges are toned; there is scattered spotting and foxing, more noticeable on some preliminary pages and around the photographed title and dedication pages. The later handwritten inscription is present as noted above.

Please examine all photographs closely for the bindings, page edges, interiors, and specific areas of wear.

A handsome pair for a collector of Greek history, classical studies, nineteenth-century publishing, or the history of American education. These are books with real shelf presence—and a story that extends from ancient Greece to the readers who studied it nearly a century and a half ago.