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=__**Summary of Homer's //The Odyssey//:**__= Odysseus is the Greek name, Ulysses is the Roman name. Odysseus was one of the men to go to King Prium to negotiate the return of Menelaus's wife, Helen. After the ten year battle of Troy, Odysseus, King of Ithaca, wanted to return home, as did the other soldiers. But on the way back He and the men on his ship come across an island to rest. What they didn't know was that it was inhabited by the Cyclops, Polyphemos, son of Poseidon, god of the sea. To escape Odysseus blinded Polyphemos and he and his men escaped by strapping themselves to the bottom of the sheep on the land and sailed off.

Polyphemos yelled out to his father, Poseidon, to curse Odysseus and his crew and to create as many obstacles for him and his men. Poseidon, angered by Odysseus's actions made it so, making in another ten years to return home. Mean while, back at his palace in Ithaca, a large and rowdy mob of suitors who had overrun Odysseus’s palace and tookover his land continued to court his wife, Penelope. She had remained faithful to Odysseus since he had been away. Prince Telemachus, Odysseus’s son, wanted desperately to throw them out but did not have enough confidence or experience to fight them all off.

=__**About this version of Homer's //The Odyssey//:**__= This version of //The Odyssey// was translated by George Herbert Palmer and illustrated by N.C.Wyeth. It was copyrighted in 1884, 1892, and 1912 but finally copyrighted in 1929 by Houghton Mifflin Company and printed by The Riverside Press in Cambridge in Massachusetts, with next to it "MDCCCXXIX." This version was translated to English from Greek over ten times. One day, Palmer went to a middle school and sat in on a class that was reading Homer's //Odyssey//, he "..found it giving more attention to its words and its grammar than to its poetry." The letter Palmer wrote to Houghton Mifflin Company, he said "..to simplify my rendering and to rid it of unnatural language, I rewrote it cover to cover thirteen times."

=** __The Book:__ **= = =

The pages towards the end of the book are mostly uncut. This shows the number of times each larger single page, or folio, was folded. Some pages are uncut just on the unbound side, but most of the pages that are uncut are both uncut on the top and on the unbound side, giving way to the fact it was folded four times, making it a quarto. The spine is made of a pig skin leather. The title of the book, author, translator, and illustration are written in gold lettering. The title and author in a larger font than the translator and the illustrator to show importance by hierarchy of text. The book's front and end cover are covered with a shimmering forest green cloth. The golden image on the front cover of the book is the same image that is on the frontispiece.

Publisher Paratext Illustration Source