Author: Sir Thomas Malory. Edited, with an introduction, by Sir Edward Strachey, Bart.
Title: Le Morte Darthur. Sir Thomas Malory’s Book of King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table. The Text of Caxton.
Publisher: London, Macmillan and Co., Limited; New York, The Macmillan Co., 1897.
Language: Text in English (Caxton-based Middle English spelling, with modern introduction and notes in Victorian English).
Size: 8 x 5.5 inches.
Pages: lvi-509 pages + publisher's add.
Binding: Attractive and fine handsome publisher’s dark green cloth binding, front board with a gilt vignette of Camelot perched on a crag and the title Le Morte Darthur lettered in gilt at the foot; spine lettered in gilt; blind-ruled frame to both boards (hinges fine - as shown) under a protective removable mylar cover. Upper edge gilt. A solid, very well-preserved copy for a late-Victorian working edition.
Content: Near fine content (bright, tight and clean, rare light foxing - as shown). A very attractive example, close to near-fine for this title, and quite difficult to find in such condition.

The book: This 1897 Macmillan crown-octavo printing of Le Morte Darthur gives modern readers one of the most influential Arthurian texts in a form that is both scholarly and highly readable. Sir Edward Strachey bases his edition on Caxton’s 1485 printing, the earliest surviving form of Malory’s masterpiece, and provides a substantial introduction on the authorship, sources and textual history of the work.

The volume opens with an extended essay on Malory, the Arthurian legends, and the transmission of the text through Caxton and later editors, followed by a long table of contents in the old style (“The Table or Rubrysshe of the Content of Chapters”), which reproduces Caxton’s chapter summaries and immediately plunges the reader into the late-medieval atmosphere. The main narrative, “The Book of King Arthur,” preserves much of Caxton’s orthography—enough to retain the flavour of Middle English prose, while still being accessible to a patient modern reader.

This edition closes, fittingly, with the moving conclusion of the whole book (Arthur’s last battle and death, and the breaking of the Round Table) followed by a typographic facsimile of Caxton’s original colophon—reminding us that we are reading not only a legendary story but also a monument of early English printing. For collectors interested in Arthuriana, Malory, or the Victorian rediscovery of medieval romance, this Macmillan Strachey edition is a key bridge between the fifteenth-century original and twentieth-century scholarship, and it makes an ideal “reading copy with soul” beside more lavishly illustrated versions.

The author: Sir Thomas Malory (d. 1471) is the elusive fifteenth-century knight—probably Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel in Warwickshire—traditionally credited with compiling Le Morte Darthur. Drawing on a vast body of French and English Arthurian romances, he condensed, re-shaped and re-told the legends of King Arthur, Lancelot, Guinevere, Tristram, Galahad and the Grail into a single continuous prose narrative.

Malory wrote in English while imprisoned during the turbulent Wars of the Roses, and his work reflects both the ideals and the anxieties of a chivalric culture on the brink of disappearance. Through Caxton’s 1485 printed edition, Le Morte Darthur became the foundation text for Arthurian literature in English, influencing Spenser, Tennyson, T. H. White, and countless modern retellings.

The editor: Sir Edward Strachey, 3rd Baronet (1812–1901), was a Victorian man of letters, biblical scholar and member of a distinguished intellectual family. His edition of Le Morte Darthur was first issued in 1868 and quickly became one of the standard nineteenth-century texts, prized for its careful collation of Caxton’s printing and its extensive introduction and notes.

Strachey’s goal was to respect the flavour of Malory’s language while making the text intelligible to a modern audience. He updated spellings where they might mislead a general reader, but retained the essential cadence and wording. His critical apparatus—especially the essays on the sources, the evolution of the Arthurian cycle and the history of chivalry—helped situate Malory within a broader medieval and Renaissance context. This 1897 Macmillan printing represents the mature form of his work, with the introduction revised and expanded in light of later scholarship, and remains an important witness in the editorial history of Le Morte Darthur.