Browse

First edition, rare. M. Baboulard is something of a dandy (notably sporting tartan trousers of a type then fashionable in both Britain and France) but he also has a wife and family of seven children and a taxing job in the ministry. Grands déplaisirs à l’occasion d’un train de plaisir is a graphic satire in the mould of Daumier on the aspirations of the newly-leisured middle classes seeking recreation on the railways. Tempted by newspaper advertisments, Baboulard books a trip to Le Havre, only to be assailed by friends and family loading him parcels, packages and a pair of dogs to deliver. The trip turns out to be a holiday from hell, and Baboulard returns to Paris duly chastened. Only one of the plates is signed by Adam, though all are demonstrably his. Among his numerous lithograph collections reflecting the rise of modernity in France this must be one of the rarest and it is especially so in coloured form. Gumuchian, Livres de l’Enfance, I, p.18. Worldcat lists the Bn copy only, there is also a copy in the National Library of Scotland (probably on account of the hero’s tartan trews).

A simplification of the camera lucida method of duplicating images by drawing their reflection in a plain glass screen place perpendicularly to both the image to be duplicated and the drawing surface. Under the right lighting it is surprisingly effective. We can find no library examples of this apparatus (or of the ‘Spectographe No. 1’ which presumably preceded it.

An attractively illustrated juvenile natural history and universal history with six aquatint plates, one showing the arrival of Columbus in America and another a hot air balloon. In dialogue form. Originally published as Récréations morales de l'enfance in 1823. There were editions under the title Beautés d’Histoire naturelle of 1832 and 1835. Worldcat: Smithsonian (Dibner copy).

A spectacular and unique interpretation of Baudelaire by Neville Lytton including 20 original watercolours with illuminated borders. The twenty poems comprise: Le Calumet de la Paix - Bohémiens en voyage - La Géante - Le Cygne - La Beauté - L’Idéal - La Vie antérieure - Sisina - Un Voyage à Cythère - XVIII - A une Passante - L’Albatros - L’Ennemi - Bien loin d’ici - Une gravure fantastique - L’Amour et le Crâne - La Cloche fêlée - Le Voyage - Le Balcon - Les Bijoux. Each of Lytton’s images is in the visionary tradition ―most have an otherworldly quality, and some border on Surrealism.
Most of the poems are given in two calligraphic versions, one probably written with a steel nib, the other with an oblique nib, perhaps a quill-pen. Three poems appear in only one version: La Cloche fêlée in steel nib version only and Le Balcon and Les Bijoux only in quill pen.
Neville Bulwer-Lytton (1879-1951) was grandson of the novelists Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Rosina Doyle Wheeler and his siblings included the suffragette Constance Lytton and Emily Lutyens. He was a man of many parts: a military officer, cricketer, Olympic athlete and artist ― educated at Eton and the École des Beaux-Arts. He was also an accomplished morris dancer and played an ivory flute.
Among several notable portraits he painted George Bernard Shaw in papal robes (in imitation of Velazquez) and a series of fashionable women in sumptuous velvets and silks, but he is best known for the series of First World War frescoes for the Victory Hall at Balcombe, Sussex. Throughout his career he also painted watercolour miniatures, intensely detailed with a distinctive coloration ― a style entirely suitable for these Baudelaire illustrations. His first wife was Judith Blunt, daughter of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (divorced in 1923), and he was an important member of circles of artists and connoisseurs around the turn of the 20th century. He was friendly with Sydney Cockerell, spent weekend with the Churchills and Eddie Marsh claimed that it was meeting Lytton that inspired his love of collecting. In 1924 Lytton married Rosa Alexandrine (Sandra) Fortel of St Rambert-en-Bugey, near Lyon and settled in France, asborbing himself deeply in French artistic culture. He wrote: ‘‘I love France because I am an artist, and in this glorious country artists are considered to be sacred --- to them gratitude is shown for the renouncing of material wealth and worldly values and the adoption of a life of struggle which as a rule is only understood by a small number of contemporaries’ (‘Reasons why I love France’ in Life in Occupied France, 1942).

First edition of this anonymous French sequel to Inchbald’s Simple Story (1791), a novel which had been as popular in France as it had been in England, and spawned a host of sequels and spinoffs there. The title-page attribution here is ambiguous (probably deliberately so) in the way in which it gives ‘par Madame de S**’ — making it unclear whether the publisher wishes to refer to a supposed author of the French Simple Histoire or simply to the author of this sequel. Among the other books listed in the adverts are four volumes of Simple Histoire testifying to its continued popularity nine years after it first appeared in France. Mistriss Walter nonetheless appears to have been entirely overlooked by Inchbald scholars. Worldcat lists US copies at Harvard and Princeton and there is a copy at Cambridge (England).

A wonderful toy schoolroom box complete with numerous paper and other accessories: an abacus, miniature chalkboards, steel rule, a steel dipping pen (with box of additional nibs), exercise books (partially completed), drawing book, copybooks, various merit points and certificates for good work, a ribbon rosette and a wire-framed floral crown. The lid illustrates a schoolroom for girls. Educational game manufacturer NK Atlas was founded by Leon Nicolas and Charles Keller at 23 rue Atlas, Paris from around 1900.

Sole edition, this copy signed and inscribed by the artist to Pierre Toreilles. For the Shakespeare 400 year centenary Hugo painted 13 very large panels depicting an imagined journey of Shakespeare from Stratford to Oxford, a journey the artist apparently traced on foot. His scenes comprise: Charlecote Park, Fowlers and the Red House of Tysoe, Gentry at Compton Wyngates, Mummers on the Green, Nearing Oxford, Chipping Camden Fair, The Road to Market,The Cotswold Games, Plough and Pasture, Hawking in the Stour Valley and Meon Hill.

‘The French artist Jean Hugo (1894-1984) produced... a set of six canvases he painted for the Shakespeare Festival Exhibition, organised by the ballet critic Richard Buckle in Stratford-upon-Avon. Opened by Prince Phillip on 23 April 1964, the exhibition celebrated the quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth and aimed to portray the world of Tudor England as it may have appeared to Shakespeare... Jean Hugo was born in Paris the great-grandson of the poet and novelist Victor Hugo. He was a painter, illustrator, theatre designer and author, whose artistic career spanned the 20th century and whose work brought him into contact with many of the most influential artistic figures of the 20th century including Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Paul Elouard, Francis Poulenc, Max Jacob, Cecil Beaton and many others.’ (V&A website). Not found in JISC/Libraryhub. Worldcat lists copies at National Gallery of Canada and University of Strasbourg only.

A good example of ‘Flecht-schule’ exercises for young girls, in which dexterity, accuracy, patience and creativity were encouraged through intricate pattern weaving in paper. This could be applied to the practical arts of embroidery but had been encouraged as an independent exercise. In addition to the 25 abstract designs here, the final two panels give the maker’s initials ‘L.W.’ and the date ‘1912’.

Number 142 or 220 copies, signed by the author and with all plates signed in pencil. Belgian born, but spending much of his life in Bolivia and Argentina, Delhez (1902-1985) was known for his exceptionally accomplished large-format woodcuts, often in the surrealist mould.

With a delightful contemporary heart-shaped ex libris belonging to a young girl (probably the bookplate of Marie Josephe Briot, later Bartoulot of Belfond, Franche-Comté), d. 1840) A rare Vesoul imprint of a popular prayer book first published in 1681 and reprinted widely well into the nineteenth century. The printer Poirson is not listed in the Répertoire d’imprimeurs/libraires (which lists a single Vesoul printer, Jean-Claude Bogillot, 168.-1760) though the CCFr does list a handful of ephemeral Poirson imprints of the 1790s.

One of 150 copies on vélin d’Arches, inscribed by the translator. Bound by Argentine binder Alicia Mozovich with a large design to the upper cover reflecting Clouzot’s figures. Worldcat lists no copies outside France.

First editions of these two separately-issued Acts of Parliament in which the British government sought to legalise the detainment of Napoleon as a prisoner of war on the island of St. Helena.

An attractive portable atlas. A reissue of the plates of the 1790 edition, with the dates altered to ‘Sepr. 1, 1792’ on all of the maps except the map of Yorkshire. Letterpress printed by C. Rickaby, whose name appears at foot of first page.

Second edition (first 1637) of this rare proto-feminist essay, probably first written around 1620 in response to the misogynist pamphlet Hic mulier, or, The Man-Woman. Austin’s title Haec Homo is an epicene (ungendered or binary) construction which joins a female definite article (Haec) with the masculine noun homo (man) to introduce the author’s thesis that men and women share common humanity as well as ‘the same reasonable soule; and, in that, there is neither hees, or shees.’ It was dedicated to ‘Mistress Mary Gifford’ and both first and second editions were issued with an engraved portrait of her, which is lacking in this copy (and in the EEBO copy). The book includes four woodcut illustrations of a ‘Vitruvian woman’. This copy was rebound in the first decades of the nineteenth century by Auguste Marie Comte de Caumont, an aristocratic French emigré who worked as a bookbinder at addresses around Soho, London for more than 20 years from 1790. ‘He is considered a very great binder, in an age when English bookbinding was temporarily at a high level, and actually far ahead of contemporary French binding’ (Ramsden, French Bookbinders 1789-1848, p. 49). This example of his work bears his Gerrard Street address, his final workshop before returning to France around 1814-15. Interestingly there is no evidence that he had experience of bookbinding before leaving France.
STC 975. ESTC: BL (lacks letterpress title), Cambridge (lacks leaf A4 and engraved title), Folger (lacks letterpress title and portrait), LC (lacks letterpress title), Illinois (lacking portrait), Minnesota, Yale.

An attractive Venetian edition by Johannes Tacuinus de Tridino, which, like the first edition of 1499 consists of the first three books on the ‘origin of things’. In this encyclopaedic work, Vergil addresses questions of origins, from the origin of the gods, man and languages to the origin of wine and liqueurs, marriage, magic, medicine, poetry, drama, geography and law. It notably includes an account of the invention of printing, attributing its birth to Peter Schoeffer, rather than Gutenberg.

A rare perspective peepshow depicting a boar hunt in a forest, with horses and dogs. Engelbrecht (1684-1756) produced many different designs of these sets in three sizes, of which ours is an example of the smallest (and rarest). They were designed to be viewed when slotted successively into a perspective viewing box but can equally be appreciated when standing in simple slots or stands. One of the parts is marked ‘N. 87’ in the plate. In this example the prints have been mounted in the early nineteenth-century. cf. Ralph Hyde, Paper Peepshows (2015), pp. 14–15 and David Robinson, ‘Augsburg Peepshows’, Print Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 2 (June 1988), pp. 188–191.�

A rare perspective peepshow depicting a stag hunt in a forest, with horses and dogs. Among the hunters is one with a rifle, and two with horns. Engelbrecht (1684-1756) produced many different designs of these sets in three sizes, of which ours is an example of the smallest (and rarest). They were designed to be viewed when slotted successively into a perspective viewing box but can equally be appreciated when standing in simple slots or stands. One of the parts is marked ‘N. 87’ in the plate. In this example the prints have been mounted in the early nineteenth-century. cf, Ralph Hyde, Paper Peepshows (2015), pp. 14–15 and David Robinson, ‘Augsburg Peepshows’, Print Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 2 (June 1988), pp. 188–191.�

First edition with decoration by Mariette Lydis, one of 50 copies on papier Hollande Pannekoek of a total edition of 180. The colophon gives 21 November 1928 and the Colloque was also published (without the Lydis illustrations) as part of Godoy’s Monologue de la tristesse et colloque de la joie a few days before on the 6th November.

Symbolist poet Godoy was born in Havana in 1880 and spent the first part of his life in Cuba and Peru, working in banking and the tobacco trade, before emigrating to France in 1919 with the express intention of becoming a poet ‘dans la langue de Baudelaire’. Much influenced by the Parnassians and the symbolists he was also a major collector of books, manuscripts and prints, amassing an unrivalled collection of Baudelaireiana. Among his numerous small-scale published works in French is his translation of Poe’s Raven — Le Corbeau d’Edgar Poe (Émile-Paul frères, 1929, with a frontispiece by Lydis).

Worldcat locates a single US copies of this issue with the Lydis illustrations (Penn State University).

First edition, number 179 of 300 copies on Arches (after 10 on Japon, total edition 310). Carteret V, 62.

First complete edition, with all 75 illustrations, as issued (the remaining 25 images of the 100 were never published). A celebrated woodblock book: ‘ the extravagant Hyakukiku ... an example of the revival of printing standards in Japanese woodblock printing in the late nineteenth century after a period of decline caused by imported Western dyes and the cultural confusion of the shock of Westernisation... some of the most technically perfect woodblock books were produced at this time’ (Hulton). Besides its enduring beauty and value as a botanical record, the book evidently bore a symbolic and patriotic dimension in this period of cultural revival. The chrysanthemum, though originating in China, was perfected by Japanese horticulturalists of the nineteenth century rather as the tulip had been in Holland in the seventeenth. The flower, associated with longevity and rejuvenation became a symbol of Japan itself and the monarchy referred to as the ‘Crysanthemum throne’ and the flower adopted as the imperial seal (depicted in one plate of the Hyaku-Giku).Produced at the height of European (notably French) interest in Japanese woodblock prints, it is tempting to forms of the purest Art Nouveau in the curling petals of these chrysanthemums.
Though the first two volumes appeared 1893 (our edition also bears that date) the third volume seems only to have appeared later, alongside reissues (from the original blocks) of the first two. The Unsodo reprint is identical to the first, save for minor variations in colouring and some slight evident wear in the blocks, as well as paper of very slightly different dimensions (the pages fractionally shorter, but wider). Hulton, Flowers in Art from East to West, 1977, pp. 111-2; Nissen I, 242 (first issue, 2 vols). COPAC lists copies at BM and V&A only (both first issue, with 2 vols only, the latter copy defective, lacking 8 plates).