A lavish deluxe edition of one of the greatest and most influential works ever written

How to get along with people, how to deal with violence, how to adjust to losing someone you love—such questions arise in most people’s lives. They are all versions of a bigger question: How do you live? This question obsessed Renaissance writers, none more than Michel de Montaigne, considered by many to be the first truly modern individual. He wrote free-roaming explorations of his thoughts and experiences unlike anything written before, and in the process invented the genre of the essay. His prose shaped the writing of some of literature’s most celebrated writers, including William Shakespeare, Christopher Hitchens, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Montaigne’s honesty and charm continues to draw people to him more than four centuries years later.

This beautiful, oversized, deluxe edition—bound in gold-lettered cloth, complete with a ribbon bookmark and full-sized facsimiles of Montaigne’s first folio pages—deserves to stand as a centerpiece in any personal library.