Essais / The Essayes (Florio translation)

Both the original-language and the English editions are collected and they are different books, not issues of one another. The original-language true first is Bordeaux, Simon Millanges, 1580 — Books I and II only; roughly 39 copies are recorded in public collections and about 50 in private hands. Book III appears for the first time in the 1588 Paris quarto of Abel L'Angelier, the fifth edition and the last published in Montaigne's lifetime, which also inserts more than 600 new passages into Books I-II; the 1595 posthumous Paris folio (Abel L'Angelier, edited by Marie de Gournay with Pierre de Brach from Montaigne's annotated copy) established the standard text. The English-market high spot is John Florio's translation, London, Val. Sims for Edward Blount, 1603 — the first unabridged translation of the Essays into any language. Florio worked primarily from the 1595 Paris folio, occasionally consulting the 1588 quarto and the Paris octavos of 1598, 1600 and 1602; so the English first descends from the 1595 text, not from the 1580 Bordeaux.