This book is BRAND NEW & SEALED & MINT and part of the Oxford University Press series "The Oxford Library of the World's Great Books".

This is a VERY RARE full-leather edition published by the Oxford University Press and manufactured by the Franklin Mint. I tried endlessly to find another copy of this book all over the internet, with no luck at all. And I've tried multiple times. I wanted to find another to add some interior pictures for informational purposes, but since there is apparently not one single other copy for sale currently in the world, I was unable. The two pictures that I included at the end are from an internally-identical Franklin Library published leather book, which has a different color of leather cover and copyright page information, but the same illustrator and illustrations. I included the close-up picture of the leather to better show its color; it is a full dark lavender/plum. There is a small tear in the plastic wrapping, as shown in picture #3. The book itself is totally unaffected. Having said all that, this is a difficult item to price. The collectible book market is over-saturated with Gargantua and Pantagruel books, but this particular one is ridiculously rare. So I will be auctioning it off.

715 pages

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The Five Books of the Lives and Deeds of Gargantua and Pantagruel is a pentalogy of novels written in the 16th century by François Rabelais. It tells the adventures of two giants, Gargantua and his son Pantagruel. The work is written in an amusing, extravagant, and satirical vein, features much erudition, vulgarity, and wordplay, and is regularly compared with the works of William Shakespeare and James Joyce. Rabelais was a polyglot, and the work introduced a great number of new and difficult words into the French language. The work was stigmatised as obscene by the censors of the Collège de la Sorbonne, and, within a social climate of increasing religious oppression in a lead up to the French Wars of Religion, it was treated with suspicion, and contemporaries avoided mentioning it. Pantagruelism, a form of stoicism, developed and applied throughout, is(among other things) a certain gaiety of spirit confected in disdain for fortuitous things

Rabelais has frequently been named as the world's greatest comic genius, and Gargantua and Pantagruel covers the entire satirical spectrum. Its combination of diverse satirical traditions challenges the readers' capacity for critical independent thinking, which is the main concern. It also promotes the advancement of humanist learning, the evangelical reform of the Church, and the need for humanity and brotherhood in politics, among other things.