Gibbon's Journey from Geneva to Rome: His Journal from 20 April to 2 October 1764.

First limited edition of Edward Gibbon's journal of the momentous journey to Italy during which he conceived his monumental History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Quarto, bound in original full vellum with a gilt-lettered spine, printed on Millbourn hand-made paper, top edge gilt, frontispiece, illustrated. One of 105 numbered copies, this is number 2. Presentation copy, inscribed by the editor in the year of publication on the limitation page, "May this copy of Gibbon's Italian Journal convey to the owner Allan Ogilvie, of Montrose, the gratitude of the editor for the interest taken in his work. G. Bonnard. May 1961." In very good condition with light soiling and toning, in the original glassine wrapper. Edited by Georges A. Bonnard. Edward Gibbon (1737 to 1794) was the greatest historian of the English Enlightenment, celebrated above all for The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, one of the supreme achievements of eighteenth-century prose. This volume prints the journal he kept during the Italian journey of 1764, the very tour on which, as he famously recalled, the idea of his great history first came to him as he sat musing amid the ruins of the Capitol in Rome while barefooted friars sang vespers in the Temple of Jupiter. Edited by the Gibbon scholar Georges A. Bonnard and printed in a tiny hand-made-paper edition, it is a treasured record of the origins of one of the monuments of Western historical writing.…