Beautiful and finely bound miniature edition of the complete works of Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace, 65-8 BCE), and one of the real miracles of microscopic printing. The microscopic, 2.5 point type was created by Henri Didot the Elder (1765-1852) in the 1820s, when he was 66. It was so small, that it could not be cast in the usual way. Instead, Didot had to invent a special apparatus, the polyamatype, which printed a hundred letters at a time. In spite of its exceedingly small size, this Didot type is very beautiful and of great clarity, in its quality unsurpassed to this day. The present work is only the second work to use it, after the 1827 miniature edition of La Rochefoucauld's Maximes et réflexions morales.
The present edition of Horace's work was edited by Auguste Filon (1800-1875). It has been beautifully printed, with wide margins. Another issue was published in the same year by A. Mesnier, also in Paris, which is identical except for the address on the title page. The Didot font was bought in 1850 by the Dutch printing form Enschedé in Haarlem, who still used it in 1900.
The boards are slightly rubbed. The leaves are lightly browned. Otherwise a very good copy with wide margins. Bondy p. 91; Welsh, A Bibliogr. of Miniature Books, 3567; cf. Bigmore & Wyman, Bibliography of Printing I, p. 177 ("this fount was a high achievement of the typefounder's art").