SIR EDWARD COKE'S COPY OF SENECA, SIGNED BY HIM AND BEAUTIFULLY BOUND

(COKE, Edward) SENECA. L. Annaei Senecae Operum Alter Tomus. Lugduni: Apud Seb. Gryphium, 1555. Thick octavo, contemporary French calf covers inset into and spine laid down over modern calf, all edges gilt and gauffered. Housed in a custom calf clamshell box. $25,000.

A great rarity: a book from the collection of Sir Edward Coke, one of the iconic figures in English history and law, with his signature on the title page: an early edition, of Seneca's works in Latin, in a beautiful contemporary French calf-gilt binding.

"Sir Edward Coke— Lord Coke, his contemporaries called him — was the great Queen Elizabeth's Attorney General and was Chief Justice under James, first Stuart King of England. The volumes that Coke wrote — his Reports and his Institutes, the first of which is the Commentary upon Littleton — remained for nearly three centuries the backlog of legal studies in England and America. Such a career is looked on as quiet, philosophic. Coke's life was no more retired than a buccaneer's. He was a handsome country gentleman who married in — succession — two beautiful young wives endowed with land, estate, and the pound sterling. Coke was above all a fighter, a born advocate who loved to feel the courtroom floor beneath his feet. Raucous, witty, ruthless, he made puns on the prisoners' names, cracked broad jokes in Latin, and at the trials of Essex, Sir Walter Ralegh, and the Gunpowder plotters, lashed out in bitter, shocking invective. Coke's life covers a long span; with him the Middle Ages end and today begins. Coke is English law personified. Perhaps no Englishman, unless it is Winston Churchill, has embodied so many aspects of government. From Elizabeth's Attorney General to James's Chief Justice is a natural transition. But from state prosecutor to wholehearted Commons man, defender of free speech and parliamentary privilege, is almost a transmutation. Coke never set foot on American soil. Yet no United States citizen can read his story without a sense of immediate recognition. As judge and leader of the Commons, Coke risked his life for the very principles we take for granted: a prisoner's right to public trial and the writ of habeas corpus, a man's right not to be jailed without cause shown, his right against self-crimination in a court of law. When Coke was seventy, James I imprisoned him for these same championships, locked him in the Tower of London until it appeared more politic to free him than to keep him in. In these parliamentary struggles of King and Commons, these Westminster courtroom battles over procedure, jurisdiction, 'right reason and the common law,' constitutional government found its way to birth. When the time came we changed the face of this English constitution; amid the sound of guns we repudiated what we hated, adapted what we liked. Yet the heritage endured" (Catherine Drinker Bowen). Coke was a great collector in his day. He "assembled a substantial library of printed books and manuscripts. A catalogue made shortly before his death in 1634 lists 1237 items, arranged by subject, suggesting the order in which they were shelved. The collection was wide ranging and as well as law included theology, history and many other subjects… A substantial core of Coke's collection (particularly law books and Italian books) remains today at Holkham Hall in Norfolk, the Coke family estate built in the 18th century by Thomas Coke, Earl of Leicester, but many books have been dispersed over the centuries…Commonly [Coke] inscribed his name on titlepages, sometimes adding the price paid" (David Pearson). Coke's interest in the works of Seneca is reflected in his writings. "Despite his principal interest in sources of English law, Coke was trained in the humanist disciplines of logic and rhetoric. His well-stocked library in Norfolk included a substantial collection of classical literature and he repeatedly drew on Cicero, Virgil, Seneca, and Tacitus throughout his Institutes in seeking to achieve the ideal balance between legal scholarship and rhetoric" (Ian King). According to Hassell's catalogue of Coke's library, Coke owned several copies of Seneca's works, and two of this edition. #741 in Hassell's Catalogue of the Library of Sir Edward Coke (Yale University Press, 1950).

Text clean, binding neatly retains beautiful contemporary calf-gilt covers and spine. An excellent copy, with distinguished provenance.