Printed for G. Routledge, Soho Square, London

i -xxx Preface, 612, 613 – Afterword. 25 March, 1720 (Original date of publication).

No title on spine. Binding scuffed.

Printed letterpress in 8-point font size: Printed letterpress in 8-point font size

Letterpress was commonly used until the early Twentieth Century (1920).

Ex Libris stamp of Muriel Alexander.

Muriel Alexander has annotated the text, starting on the first page and continued by marking many lines she found of interest, the last being found on page 553, indicating that she read the whole book.

The Alexander Theatre.

The initial idea for the theatre came about in 1929, however plans did not come to fruition until 1951 when the theatre could be built thanks to life memberships and public donations.[1] The theatre was originally founded as the Johannesburg Repertory Theatre (also known as the Reps' Theatre), seating 550 people in a Scandinavian design. It opened in Braamfontein in November 1951 as the home of the Johannesburg Repertory Players (Johannesburg Reps).[2]

On March 10, 1960, it was renamed the Alexander Theatre after Muriel Alexander, the founder of the Johannesburg Reps and a renowned actress, director and teacher of speech and drama.[1] It opened with Hugh Goldie's production of George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra. The theatre was later used for professional performances by the Reps as well as by other companies. The Reps' last performance here was held in 1969: Noël Coward's Present Laughter. Later, TRUK (Transvaal Performing Arts Center) leased it, and around 1978, that arts council purchased it. By 1997 the theatre had fallen victim to the urban decay of the inner city and subsequently closed with a fall in attendance.[1] In 2001 due to the efforts of the Reps and the theatre's owners, including Jack Ginsberg, the building underwent a R2.5 million refurbishment program and the theatre reopened.[1] In 2006, Adam Levy bought and restored the theatre as part of his urban renewal program in Braamfontein.[1] As much as possible of the original architecture has been preserved. The new venue opened in July 2007 with Hazel Feldman's production of the rock musical Rent.

"Many consider [this translation] the greatest English Iliad, and one of the greatest translations of any work into English. It manages to convey not only the stateliness and grandeur of Homer’s lines, but their speed and wit and vividness." -- Daniel Mendelsohn, "Englishing the Iliad: Grading Four Rival Translations," The New Yorker Blog, 11/1/2011

When Homer's Iliad appeared in Alexander Pope's majestic translation between 1715 and 1720, it was acclaimed by Samuel Johnson as "a performance which no age or nation could hope to equal." A few years later, Pope oversaw the translation of the Odyssey. Other translations have since appeared, but Pope's is unrivalled in its melodious beauty. This is the Iliad that has formed generations of British and American culture through a beauteous poetics that lends itself to easy recollection.

The size, often called pocket-size:

Name: trigesimo-secundo or thirty-twomo.

Abbreviation: 32º or 32mo. Leaves: 32; Pages: 64

Approximate cover size (width × height): 89 × 140mm

The Signature marks for binding are present.

Signature marks are those letters, numbers, and sometimes symbols at the bottom of the first portion of gatherings to help binders assemble the sheets of a book into the right order. For those of you who’ve been reading along with our various earlier posts on impositions, you’ll remember that books in the handpress era were printed not as single leaves, but as sheets with varying numbers of pages per side. (It’s certainly much less labor- and material-intensive than printing one page at a time.) What this means is that one sheet of paper might contain, once properly folded, 2 leaves (a folio), 4 leaves (a quarto), 8 leaves (an octavo), 12 leaves (a duodecimo or twelvemo), etc. 1 The key thing is to keep track of folding your sheets in the right direction so that the leaves end up in the right order and to keep track of the order of your sheets so that when the multiple gatherings are bound together, the text proceeds in the correct order.

Analysis of the signature marks on this book is interesting as the book is long enough to start a second alphabetical series: AA, BB etc. In addition we discovered a missing signature of 8 pages and several anomalies in the regular sequence of signatures.

See the accompanying Excel spreadsheet.

Jack Ginsberg. 13 April 2026.