Large quarto/small folio: 372 pages. Beautifully bound in gilt decorated marbled or tree calf, with red endpapers, all edges gilt and dentelles. This is a large and heavy book, made on thick and creamy paper. A small bit of toning on the titl pag, but other pages with their large margins are perfectly clean and fresh. One of the lovely printing works of the English printer and publisher John Baskerville, giving a beautiful edition of the three great Latin poets, Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius. A small format 12mo edition appeared the same year. The Baskerville type is regarded as a transitional serif typeface intended as a refinement of the old-style typefaces of the period such as Calson. Comprising the poems of the Augustan elegiac poet Sextus Propertius, the neoteric poet of the late Roman Republic Gaius Valerius Catullus, and the elegiac poet Albius Tibullus. The layout is airy, the typography elegant, the margins large. They characterize the editions of John Baskerville (1706-1775), who, in Birmingham, was one of the great European printers of the 18th century, like Didot in France. It was Baskerville, founder and typographer, who invented around 1750 the vellum paper "made on a form where the parallel lines are replaced by a brass cloth, sometimes in silver, thin enough to leave no visible imprint on the paper", and which was used for the deluxe editions. Beaumarchais bought the typographic material from the widow of Baskerville and transferred it to Kehl... thence to the famed Kehl edition of Voltaire.