COLLETET, François. ~ Traittez des langues estrangeres, de leurs alphabets, et des chiffres. Paris: chez Jean Promé, marchand libraire, en sa boutique proche des Augustins, à l’enseigne du Cheval de Bronze, 1660.
4to (229 × 176 mm), pp. [8], 64, including 36 diagrams of alphabets and 9 of codes and ciphers, typographical and woodcut ornaments. Contemporary marbled paper covered wrappers. Rubbed, with a little further wear to spine and corners. An excellent copy.
First edition of one of the earliest French attempts to catalogue and describe the writing systems of various historic and contemporary languages — presented as a kind of museum of alphabets reflecting the diversity of human language and writing. It includes ancient Hebrew, Chaldean, Syriac, Phoenecian, Arabic, Greek, Armenian, Coptic, Georgian, Ethiopic, Etruscan and Gothic examples, as well as more than one alphabet deemed occult or ‘geomantic’. At least some appear to be imagined, and there seems no doubt that the intent here is as much aesthetic as scholarly. Colletet concludes with an alphabet which has recently come to his attention (he writes), engraved by someone he knows, formed entirely of characters derived from the postures of the human figure. He also notes the existence of examples of many more alphabets in various personal collections, notably that of the Parisian cleric René Michel de la Rochemaillet (1597-1658).
The second part is devoted to codes, ciphers and secret writing, also illustrated, and appears to be a rather faulty abrigement of Blaise de Vigenère’s Traicté des chiffres, ou Secrètes manières d’escrire. It includes alphabets disguised as stars and as masonry.
François Colletet (1628-1680?) was a poet, the son of the poet Guillaume Colletet, a protégé of Cardinal Richelieu. Galland, Historical and analytical Bibliography of the Literature of Cryptology, p. 44. Brunet II, 155; Graesse, VII (Supplement), p. 195.