Voltaire (François Marie Arouet de) Candide, ou lOptimisme, first edition,woodcut ornament to title and tail-pieces, with penultimate leaf N7 (blank) present but final leaf N8 (instructions to the binder) a stub only, some light foxing and browning, mostly to upper margin, contemporary mottled sheep-backed boards, gilt spine with red morocco label, [Barber 299G; Bengesco 1434; Morize 59a; PMM 204], a very good copy, 12mo, [Geneva], [Gabriel Cramer], 1759.

*** 'Voltaire's style and originality at their incomparable best' (PMM).A rare copy of the true first edition, with the following issue points: the title ornament of spray, fruit and flowers is repeated at pp. 193 and 266; p. 103, line 4, has the misprint 'que ce ce fut' (corrected to 'que ce fut' in later editions); p. 125, line 4, has 'précisément' (corrected to 'précipitamment' in later editions); with Voltaire's revisions on p. 31 eliminating an unnecessary paragraph break, and on p. 41 the rewritten several short sentences on the Lisbon earthquake. This first edition does not preserve the cancelled paragraph on p. 242 critical of German poets (beginning Candide était affligé").

The bibliographical history of this book has been exasperatingly complex and confused, not least because before handing over a final manuscript to Cramer, Voltaire went behind his back and sent a slightly different version of the manuscript to John Nourse, a printer in London, who may well have dispatched copies to other publishers, The result was that within weeks of the first edition of Candide appearing in Geneva, sixteen other editions appeared in Paris, London and Amsterdam. The identification of the present issue as the true editio princeps, already supposed by Bengesco and Gagnebin, was recently confirmed by the cumulative analyses of Ira Wade, Giles Barber, and Stephen Weissman: the Genevan printing must be considered earlier than the other three editions containing 299 pages published in 1759 and than the thirteen others of different size printed in Europe in the same year.

Drawing on the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 for inspiration, this conte philosophique became an almost instant best-seller with about 20,000 copies selling in the first year, in spite of initial censorship.