Great set of text and plates (34 leaves) from the first edition of this enormously influential work. The plates form a series of illustrations on the languages of the world. Seventeen text pages precede the 25 engraved plates that cover the alphabets, including Arabic, Ethiopian, Egyptian, Anglo-Saxon, Russian, Greek, Persian, Japanese, Chinese and several others. The Encyclopédie was published under the direction of Diderot with articles written by the most prominent philosophers of the time. These great minds collaborated in the goal of assembling and disseminating the fruits of accumulated knowledge and learning. Containing 72,000 articles written by more than 140 contributors, it was a massive reference work for the arts and sciences that served to propagate Enlightened ideas. Due to problems of censorship, the first edition was issued over a period of 21 years, in an original printing of approximately 4,000 copies.

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Condition: B

Some slight water staining on bottom of some pages.