Essais / The Essayes (Florio translation)

The book was set hastily and probably printed at the author's expense, and its defects are the identification: abundant misprints, inconsistent founts and type, and famously erratic pagination in the second part, which runs to 653 pages but is misnumbered 650 without loss — the variants are so numerous that essentially no two copies collate alike, and no single ideal pagination can be reconstructed. Étienne de La Boétie's sonnets follow the chapter "De l'amitié" here; they were dropped from the 1595 posthumous edition, so their presence is a point