A Signed Limited Editions Club Edition Illustrated by Enric-Cristobal Ricart

CERVANTES, Miguel de. Don Quixote of La Mancha. Barcelona: Limited Editions Club, 1933. Two volumes. Translated, with introduction, by John Ormsby. Illustrated with wood engravings by Enric-Cristobal Ricart. Designed and printed by Victor Oliva at Oliva de Vilanova.

A handsome signed Limited Editions Club edition of Don Quixote, printed in Barcelona in 1933 and illustrated throughout with striking wood engravings by the Catalan artist Enric-Cristobal Ricart.

Issued in two volumes and limited to 1,500 numbered copies signed by Ricart, the edition possesses an especially appropriate cultural and artistic setting for Cervantes’ masterpiece. Rather than being produced merely as an American fine press edition, the work was designed and printed in Spain itself by Victor Oliva at the distinguished Oliva de Vilanova press in Barcelona, giving the set a distinctly Spanish visual and typographic identity.

Edition & Physical Description

Two volumes.

Limited Editions Club edition, this being copy number 574 of 1,500 copies signed by Enric-Cristobal Ricart.

Translated and introduced by John Ormsby, whose English version remains among the most respected and enduring translations of Cervantes’ text.

Bound in the publisher’s half red cloth with gilt titles and patterned paper-covered boards, preserved in the original slipcase.

Ricart and the Spanish Wood Engraving Tradition

The visual character of the edition rests above all in Ricart’s wood engravings.

Enric-Cristobal Ricart, associated with the Catalan revival of wood engraving in the early twentieth century, brought a distinctly modern yet deeply Spanish sensibility to Cervantes’ wandering knight and his world. His illustrations avoid sentimental romanticism and instead emphasize the stark, graphic, and often ironic qualities already present in Cervantes’ text.

The engravings possess a strong architectural rhythm and dramatic contrast characteristic of interwar Spanish graphic art. Their sharp black-and-white compositions complement the strange duality at the heart of Don Quixote itself: simultaneously comic and tragic, absurd and noble, satirical and deeply humane.

Printed in Barcelona only a few years before the Spanish Civil War, the edition also belongs to a remarkable moment in Catalan artistic and typographic culture, when printers, engravers, and publishers sought to reconnect modern book production with older Iberian craft traditions.

The Limited Editions Club

The Limited Editions Club became one of the great American fine press enterprises of the twentieth century, celebrated for pairing major literary texts with important artists, printers, and typographers from around the world.

Its finest productions often transcended ordinary illustrated editions and became international collaborations between literature, graphic art, and fine printing. This Don Quixote is especially successful because the entire production context feels organically tied to Cervantes himself: a Spanish printing, Spanish illustrations, and one of the defining works of Spanish literature.

The result feels less like a modern reissue and more like a twentieth-century homage to the long visual and literary afterlife of Don Quixote.

Cervantes and the Modern Novel

Few books occupy a more central place in literary history than Don Quixote.

First published in the early seventeenth century, Cervantes’ masterpiece fundamentally reshaped prose fiction and is often regarded as the first modern novel. Through the tragicomic figure of Alonso Quixano — the aging hidalgo who transforms himself into the knight Don Quixote after reading too many romances — Cervantes created a work simultaneously parodying literary illusion and defending the human need for imagination itself.

The novel’s extraordinary tonal complexity remains startlingly modern. Comedy repeatedly shifts into melancholy, satire into tenderness, delusion into dignity. It is precisely this instability between ridicule and grandeur that has allowed Don Quixote to remain perpetually alive across centuries of readers, artists, and interpreters.

Condition

Volumes very good or better.

The spines are somewhat sunned, as often encountered with the edition, though the bindings remain attractive overall. Internally the books are well preserved.

The original slipcase survives, though in fair condition, with one upper edge detached, a chip to the open edge, and moderate wear overall.

An attractive signed Limited Editions Club set combining Spanish printing, Ricart’s wood engravings, John Ormsby’s classic translation, and the enduring appeal of one of the foundational works of world literature.