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Conventional politics is rarely expressed in De Bournazel’s work, which tends to explore more universal experience. But occasionally it emerges, if only by allusion. Created in a particularly turbulent year in French culture and politics Assemblée générale bears a couple of teasing red and blue brush strokes on the cover label. Inside, however, the Assemblée générale envisaged by the artist feels like an interior politics rather than any played out in the machinery of the French state — densely populated, variegated and unsettling.

‘Nightfalls’ — a tumbling exploration of the nocturnal adventures of the mind and of the porous boundary between the real and imaginary worlds.

The French expression, Entre chien et loup refers to the twilight hours when it is hard to tell the difference between dog and wolf, but it also expresses the liminal spaces between the familiar and the unknown, or the tame and the wild. It denotes also the uncertain emotional territory between hope and fear, expressed playfully by Diane de Bournazel in the labyrinthine paths drawn across the pages of this unique artist’s book. As always with De Bournazel, words are scarce and ‘Là’ ’Tu sais’, ‘Je m’interroge’ and ‘encore’ provide the extent of the text here.

An exploration of the heart.

In this sequence, the artist draws on the spaces created by slate fragments impressed into the heavy rag paper (when wet). The slates leave asymmetrical spaces (’Îles flottantes’) – each a matrix of their surface texture.

A correspondence course for amateur binders in 1960s France, aimed, according to the inserted advert at the retired, at professionals in search of a diverting hobby, office workers, young mothers and adolescents. The 21 parts of cours ‘A’ give detailed instructions in casing, and bindings of several types: bradel, cloth, half sheep (’basane’) and half cloth, with instructions for paper cleaning. Apparently a second ‘Cours B’ offered instruction in gilding.

A rare publisher’s advert for a short-lived satirical almanac devoted to the comic lowlife of the Parisian Latin Quarter, with its famously hedonistic students and lorettes courtesans or sex workers). The lorette emerged both in reality and in the popular imagination during the July Monarchy (1830-48), named after the Right Bank church of Notre Dame de Lorette where they were thought to reside and the almanac promises a range of playful gender inverting fun based on the ‘Vésuviennes’ (popular heroines of the 1848 revolution who donned uniform and took to the barricades) including the confessions of a Vésuvienne and their ‘Charte-Constitution’.
During the February Revolution of 1848, French women briefly hoped for political rights and an improvement in their social situation. Such hopes were short-lived and popular reaction was expressed in satires like this. The complex image of the Vésuvienne woman warrior, both pleasantly seductive and scandalously rebellious. She appeared in all the major newspapers, while real women in the streets claimed this title by parading under a Vesuvian banner. Their morality was often called into question and it is no surprise to see lorettes and Vésuviennes share a billing here. In Belhomme’s lithograph, three lorettes step out of basket (one thumbing her nose); a reflection of a popular contemporary song ‘Le Panier aux lorettes’.

A superb copy of first editions of both Mariette Lydis’s suites of illustrations for Les Fleurs du Mal. The 1928 set as copy B (one of 15 on vieux japon) of a total edition of 353 copies, with an original watercolour and 10 etched and coloured plates (in three states, including artist’s proofs often coloured in wash or crayon, signed/annotated in pencil) plus the 1935 set with 33 handcoloured lithographs issued in 11 cahiers. The 1935 plates and watercolour are bound with the text and the 1928 plates are bound after. The 1928 sequence, exhibited at the Salon d’Automne that year is probably one of Mariette Lydis’s best works, while the more extensive 1935 sequences illustrates her evolving style and was exhibited by Lydis in New York.
Govone issued his large-format Baudelaire in 1928, together with just 125 copies of the accompanying suite of etched plates by Lydis. It was the first joint production of this important partnership. Though both partners were resolutely bisexual, Lydis married Count Giuseppe Govone (her third husband) in 1934. The two remained married until his death in Milan in 1948 despite Mariette Lydis flight to Buenos Aires before the Second World War. In 1935 Lydis prepared a new suite of plates.
Both suites are bound here, preserving wrappers in a superb contemporary binding by one of the most celebrated binders of the Art Deco era, Louise Marot, who together with her daughter Suzanne Rodde created a series of bindings of exceptional refinement in the 1930s, before Louise’s untimely death in 1938 and the closure of the Marot-Rodde workshop. Their design for Les Fleurs du Mal is an exquisite and technically astonishing floral motif (evoking both the poppy and the rose) to both covers of this large volume. It is especially interesting as an early example of the ‘irradiante’ style, with sinuous lines creating the illusion of both movement and an undulating surface, usually associated with the binder Paul Bonet in subsequent decades. Bonet was experimenting with the earliest of these radiant designs at precisely the time Marot-Rodde created this one (ie. between 1935 and 1938). One has to wonder which way the influence flowed. Discussing the works of women binders in Paris in the 1920s and 30s, Duncan and De Barta comment: ‘Many of the works of these women have an exquisite delicacy and flow absent from the more formal compositions of their male counterparts. Examination of Marot-Rodde’s abstract floral designs, for example, reveals a preciosity and sensuality that male binders did not achieve.’ Duncan & De Barta, Art Nouveau and Art Deco Bookbinding (1989), pp. 20 and 194; Tidcombe, Women Bookbinders 1880-1920 (1996), p. 189.

The fashion for dressing prints existed probably from the origin of printed illustrations themselves, though it was a widespread, predominantly female recreation during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, often with a devotional intent.

The subjects here are Franciscan: Francis himself in a version of the legend of the appearance to him of the Virgin and Infant Christ, and Anthony of Padau in friar’s habit with an infant and a cherub. St Francis is the most elaborate of the two, with almost all of the cut print’s surface covered with colour, several silk brocade fabrics (brown, black, white and silver), gold paper highlights and glittering ground glass. Cherries on a tree above the group are rendered in tiny red wax spots, giving a round and shiny surface to each. The border is of black lacquer-like paint and gold paper, and an engraved Latin caption reads: ‘Quid parvum Francisce adeo miraris Iesu / Expecta pendens in cruce maior erit’. The surrounding parchment surface is illuminated with full borders of pink roses. Saint Anthony’s robe is rendered with a single piece of shiny brown silk, with narrow painted bands of the original print giving the impression of its folds. The grassy ground on which he kneels, and the tree above him shine with fragments of ground green glass.

First edition of the last book by a prolific French clairvoyant — in the form of a decree from the gods of Mount Olympus, this is a spirited plea in favour of the Duchesse de Berry then imprisoned for leading a rebellion against Charles X after the July Revolution. Like Le Normand’s other works it is couched in terms of dreams, predictions and angelic interventions. It bears her signature on the back of the half-title as a measure against piracy and the frontispiece shows her taking the Duchesse’s hand in prison, as an angel swoops down to crown her.

Marie-Anne Le Normand (1772–1843) was a celebrated (or notorious) clairvoyant, publisher, booskeller and self-publicist Famed throughout Europe for her exclusive clientele, she popularised cartomancy and spawned an enormous wave of imitators. At the height of her career she claimed to have advised the likes of Robespierre, Talleyrand, Metternich, the Empress Josephine and Emperor Alexander himself; others argued that the whole thing was a sham, and she was frequently arrested, spending several weeks in prison.

A rare broadside offering a proposal to put the poor (’Beggars, or idle stroling persons’) to work in the making of sail-cloth in a workhouse ‘to be built, in some convenient Place near the River Thames, within five Miles of London, to be managed by Governors, Gratis, in the Nature of St. Thomas’s’ Hospital.’ Its anonymous author notes ‘That... many Thousands of Men, Women, and Children are daily stroling about these great Cities of London and Westminster, without Employment, and having found, by Begging and Pilfering, an easier Way of Maintenance, than by Working, do initiate and train up their Children therein, as if it was a lawful Trade: Insomuch that they are become insolent, and often disturb People in the Streets and Houses by Day, and render them unsafe by Nights...’

The item appears in Wing ( L1366A) which suggests 1697 as an unlikely date of publication. It is more likely to date from c. 1731 when an ‘Act for Further Encouraging the Manufacture of British Sail Cloth’ was passed in Parliament — the broadside’s author notes the the Commons have recently considered methods of encouraging the manufacture of sail-cloth. Goldsmiths’-Kress no. 06901.1.

The Arundel Societies superb colour printed version of Hans Memling’s Jan Floreins Triptych, copied by Christian Schultz.
The Society was founded in 1849 at a meeting in the house of the painter Charles Eastlake, who became the first Director of The National Gallery, and was named after the Earl of Arundel, collector and patron - a man whom Horace Walpole described as the ‘father of Vertue in England’. The Society saw the progress of art in England as being dependent on popular taste. It was established with the aim to promote a greater knowledge of art through the publication of literary works and high quality reproductions of Italian fresco cycles, classical art and a handful of Northern European masterpieces. John Ruskin was an early member. Many modern British artists who did not travel, including the Pre-Raphaelites, and many collectors and an entire art-hungry class were only familiar with the Old Masters in colour through Arundel Society prints. The Society was discontinued in 1897, when it was overwhelmed by the use of photography.
The prints did not rely on photography and were not made directly from the original paintings. Instead from 1852 skilled copyists were sent out across Europe (by Henry Layard of the Society) to make smaller, very accurate water- and body-colour copies directly from the originals, probably using Windsor and Newton ‘Moist Colours’ in zinc tubes, which had been available from 1846. Each colour used was given its own lithographic stone, and up to 20 stones were drawn upon by hand and printed from to build a composite colour image. Standardising the colours throughout the complex process produced rather saturated but faithful copies, entirely by hand, before colour photography. Perhaps the greatest copyist, Christian Schultz, was also a lithographer.
Memling painted this triptych in 1479 for brother Jan Floreins of the Oud Sint-Janshospitaal in Bruges, where it remains as part of the collection of the Memlingmuseum. He probably depicted himself to the left of the central panel, where he kneels behind a wall, holding an open book. The two panels on the verso of the wings, which are visible when closed, depict John the Baptist and Saint Veronica. The patron’s initials ‘IK’ are visible in the margins and these two panels include a trompe l’oeil lock which visually ‘fastens’ as the triptych is closed - reproduced faithfully in the Arundel copy. The Society made facsimiles of only two Flemish artists: Van Eyck (The Ghent Altarpiece) and Memling (The Lubeck altarpiece and the present Jan Floreins triptych). W. Noel Johnson, A Handbook (Catalogue raisonné) to the Collection of Chromo-lithographs from Copies of important Works of Ancient Masters, published by the Arundel Society: with historical and special artistic Record and Notes (1907) 182-6.

First edition of the first standard code of the order of Freemasons in England. It was to become the basis of Masonic constitutions on both sides of the Atlantic, being the edition from which Franklin printed the Philadelphia constitutions the following year.

Anderson, born at Aberdeen, and educated as a Minister of the Church of Scotland moved to London in 1707, where he continued preaching and is reputed to have lost money in an unwise investment in the South Sea Company. ‘He was commissioned to write a history of freemasonry on behalf of the grand lodge of England, which had been founded in London in 1717. A freemason himself, Anderson was grand warden of the lodge when he published the work as The constitutions of the free-masons; containing the history, charges, regulations, &c. of that fraternity (1723). A second edition followed in 1738 that provided a fuller account of the speculative origins and early history of English masonry. Intended primarily as an ‘apologia’ that would give “a relatively new institution an honourable descent”... Anderson’s Constitutions was long accepted as the standard code of the craft and was translated into German in 1741’ (Oxford DNB).

The printing of the Constitutions was an enterprise which drew together several prominent British Freemasons. Anderson was assisted by Newtonian natural scientist John Theophilus Desaguliers, member of the Royal Society, named in the approbation here as Deputy Grand Master of the Grand Lodge. Publisher John Senex also reveals himself as a mason, while the fine frontispiece is by John Pine. It was this image which elevated Pine to the status of principal engraver to the Grand Lodge and he subsequently executed many works on their behalf. The final section contains masonic songs (with music) including ‘The Enter’d Prentices Song’ in six verses. Vibert, The Rare Books of Freemasonry, II, (1).

A complete set of the small plates for Le Brun’s influential artists’ manual, Conférence sur l’expression générale des passions (lectures at the French Académie royale given between 1668 and 1678, but not printed until 1698). They are preserved in their original uncut state, four plates to an uncut sheet. Each sheet retains the stab holes for stitching in oblong format, probably the form in which they were issued by Picart, with the plates reorientated here when bound on guards in the nineteenth century. They were evidently sold separately, uncut as here, but were also issued dissected with the small format editions of the Conférence.

Le Brun had lectured on the expression of emotions and produced a set of drawings to illustrate tranquility, admiration, desire, apprehension, joy, sadness, contempt and hatred, jealousy, and despair and fury. The lectures and the illustrations (’expressive heads’) were not published until 1698, when they appeared as Caractères des Passions which swiftly became one of the principal artists’ manual and was reprinted several times within a few decades, including in English. These Picart plates ‘correspond to [the first edition] with the addition of eleven new plates, except for fig. no. 34. Here, for the first time, the previously rather strange head-dress of this figure has been clearly represented as a metal helmet, thus making it easier to recognise in it Rhosaces, the man about to strike Alexander in the Battle of the Granicus’ (Montagu).

This set bears the stamp and spine title of the Pictura Groningen (the stamp being Lugt 2028); a print collection now widely dispersed. Jennifer Montagu, The Expression of the Passions. The Origin and Influence of Chalres Le Brun’s Conférence sur lexpression générale et particulière (Yale, 1994) B.8.

First edition. Fragoletta, in which a woman (albeit expressed as neither fully female or male) disguises herself as a man and seduces another woman, was a major point of reference for early nineteenth-century literature, notably inspiring Balzac’s Séraphîta and Théophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin with its fascination with the androgynous or doubly-sexed body. It clearly took inspiration from Bernini’s statue of the sleeping hermaphrodite and is one of the first nineteenth century novels to feature a hermaphrodite protagonist. It’s most obvious echo in English literature is in Swinburne, whose 1866 Poems and Ballads contained the poem ‘Fragoletta’ — an ode to androgyny in which the boy/girl (’a double-rose’) is rendered more desirable by their double sexuality.

A rare Norman Office of the Saints dedicated to saints and other feasts added to those of the traditional Roman breviary by papal decree. It gives prayers and readings for each, including those for Saints Canute (January 19), Patrick (March 17), Anselm of Canterbury (April 21), Monica (May 4), Margaret of Scotland (July 8), Cajetan (August 7), Wenceslas (28 September), Laurence Justinian (September 5), Notre Dame de Mercede (September 24) and Francis Xavier (December 3). The printer, Rémy Le Boullenger (1637?-1707) is not among the three Lisieux printers listed in the Répertoire d’imprimeurs/libraires and appears in just a handful of imprints in the CCFr (among which ours does not appear).

The binding is made from a reused leaf from a medieval antiphonal, probably French, of the fourteenth- or early fifteenth century, which bears fragments of chants on four-line staves ruled in red. On the outer cover is a portion of a text from Acts 12: 11 (‘Petrus ad se reversus dixit nunc scio vere quia misit Dominus angelum suum et eripuit me de manu Herodis et de omni expectatione plebis Iudaeorum’) and on the inner appears a fragment of Matthew 16: 17-18 (‘Et ego dico tibi quia tu es Petrus et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam et portae inferi non praevalebunt adversum eam’; And I say unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it). In comparable antiphoners, both appear among antiphons sung on the feast of Saint Peter and Paul (29 June).

First published in Latin in 1520, this is considered the first ethnographic compendium of the Early Modern period in Europe, a collection of the manners and customs of all mankind, as it was then known to most Europeans. It considers Africa, Asia and Europe. It first appeared in French in 1540. Its first appearance in English was as William Waterman’s The Fardle of Facions in 1555 and it was printed in forty-seven editions between 1535 and 1620. British Library and Bibliothèque nationale only in WorldCat. Atkinson, La Littérature géographique fraņçaise de la Renaissance: répertoire bibliographique (Paris, 1927), n° 73.

First edition of Olive Custance’s second collection (after Opals of 1897), published in the year of her elopement and marriage to Lord Alfred Douglas and containing the suite written for him, ‘The Fairy Prince’. Custance’s marriage, frowned upon by her parents, had come only a year after her supposed affair with Natalie Clifford Barney in Paris, and the Rainbows contains poems of desire from various points in the spectrum, notably ‘A Dancing Girl’ and ‘The White Witch’. Barney recounted that Custance had written the lines ‘Her face is like the faces the Dreamer sometimes meets, A face that Leonardo would have followed through the streets’ on seeing a version of Barney’s portrait [which] later appeared in ‘The White Witch’ (Pulham, ‘Tinted and Tainted Love: The Sculptural Body in Olive Custance’s Poetry’, Yearbook of English Studies, 37, 1, p. 164).
The elaborate contemporary binding is signed ‘E. Dreyfous’, the Grosvenor Square dealer in antiques, Edouard Henry Dreyfous who counted the Royal Family among his customers.

A diminutive French prayerbook for personal Catholic devotions with an interesting English provenance, inscribed by one Mary Radclyffe. Given that this is a Catholic prayer book there is a strong possibility that it was bought, owned and inscribed by Lady Mary Radclyffe (1732–1798) of an English Catholic family with longstanding links to the exiled Stuarts. Mary’s father, Charles, a Jacobite and freemason, was an illegitimate grandson of Charless II (by Moll Davis) and spent most of his life in exile in Europe. He took part in the Jacobite Riding of 1745 and was executed the following year. Mary Frances Guillelma Radclyffe was born at Rome in 1732 and married Francis Eyre of Warkworth Castle in February 1755. Their eldest daughter, Maria Eyre, was born later that year.

Sole edition of the small catalogue issued to accompany Monnier’s needlework exhibition at the Galerie Druet at 20, rue Royale, ‘Du lundi 5 mai au vendredi 30 mai 1924’. Copy number 13 of 15 on Japon (before 25 on Hollande and 100 on ordinary paper, total edition 140 copies).

It lists just 14 pieces (1918-1923) including some of her most celebrated pieces including a set of four tarot images, l’Abeille and Palme (illustrating Valéry) and Féerie, after Léon-Paul Fargue. Valéry wrote in his preface: ‘Mais considérez ces panneaux merveilleusement colorés. Leur éclat les apparente aux plus merveilleuses productions de la vie, aux élytres, aux plumes d’oiseau, aux coquillages, aux pétales. Nulle peinture ne peut atteindre à ces forces ni à ces délicatesses que les brins de soie savamment associés font paraître’.

Marie Monnier was the wife of the artist Paul-Émile Bécat and sister of bookseller-publisher Adrienne Monnier (Sylvia Beach’s partner). Marie exhibited both in her sister’s bookshop and at the Galerie Druet. She also created a large embroidery inspired by Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake and painted one of the famous signboards for Shakespeare and Company (now at Princeton). Worldcat lists US copies at Harvard and Princeton (three copies in the Sylvia Beach collection).