Search

King Victorian Decorated Trade Bindings 361 (John Leighton).

Not in King Victorian Decorated Trade Bindings

A comprehensive descriptive catalogue of the published works of Mariette Lydis 1922-1940, including several unique items. With an introductory essay and bibliography.

First edition. A preface explains the etymology of the novel’s subtitle: Cigisbéisme [’cicisbeism’] — the custom, probably of Italian origin, of a married woman keeping an additional male companion, either Platonic or otherwise. Its author, Durdent, produced several other novels and a translation of Edgeworth’s Fanny. Despite its promising subject matter, Clémentina appears to have gone almost entirely unnoticed by contemporary reviewers.

This copy is complete with spine labels (two for each volume) printed on the verso of the title-page of the second volume. Thankfully, they have not been used in binding here (which has black labels lettered in gilt supplied by the binder) since their use would entail sacrificing the title page. It seems an odd place to print them, and where such printed title-pages have been encountered elsewhere they have been printed on a blank. Worldcat: Cambridge (England) and Toronto only.

First edition. A novel illustrating the contemporary vogue for fiction based on the records of the French law courts. A contemporary reviewer in the Revue encyclopèdique savaged the novel itself but evidently found the 38-page introduction interesting - being a commentary on the merits of the relatively recent development of trial by jury in France. The book found several other reviews in the same year and evidently divided opinion. The Revue bibliographique du Royaume des Pays-bas simply noted ‘Cet ouvrage a été saisi par la police’.

Dubergier, who did not put his name on the title, was prolific both as a translator from English and as a novelist in his own right — usually favouring popular literature of the Walter Scott variety, sometime with Scottish or Irish settings. Querard, 11, p. 115. Worldcat lists the Bn and Princeton copies only.

First edition. This important anti-slavery act, now approaching its bicentenary, was a direct result of the formation of the Anti-Slavery Society in 1823, and renewed political agitation by key abolitionist figures such as Wilberforce and Clarkson. The society was founded on 31 January 1823, when a group well known for their opposition to the slave trade met at the King’s Head tavern in the City of London. ‘Its purpose was to rouse public opinion to bring as much pressure as possible on parliament, and the new generation realized that for this they still needed Clarkson... He rode some 10,000 miles and achieved his masterpiece: by the summer of 1824, 777 petitions had been sent to parliament demanding gradual emancipation’. Also in this year, Wilberforce published his Appeal to the Religion, Justice and Humanity of the Inhabitants of the British Empire in behalf of the Negro Slaves in the West Indies, in which he ‘dwelt on the moral and spiritual degradation of the slaves and presented their emancipation as a matter of national duty to God. It proved to be a powerful inspiration for the anti-slavery agitation in the country’ (Oxford DNB).

‘The Consolidated Slave Act repealed previous legislation on slavery and brought together all slave laws into one act. The act was designed to eliminate the more vicious provisions of the West Indian slave codes while simultaneously setting out new guidelines for the better treatment of slaves and free people of color. As recommended by the commission, the act included clauses that facilitated manumission’. Newton, ‘The King v. Robert James, a Slave, for Rape: Inequality, Gender, and British Slave Amelioration, 1823-1834’ in Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 47, no. 3, 2005, pp. 592-3. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3879392. Accessed 12 Mar. 2024.

First edition. Boydell’s tables allowed dealers in beer, wine and spirits to accurately assess the true contents of part-used casks through measurement of ullage (the empty portion of any barrel) — an essential calculation in tax and excise assessments. Several new editions were advertised in the nineteenth-century but all editions are rare.
The author was probably the same Boydell who described himself as ‘ships-husband’ on the title of his The Merchant Freighter’s and Captains of Ships Assistant - Being Tables Calculated with the Greatest Accuracy (‘London: printed for the author... and to be had at Lloyd's, the New York, the New England, the Jamaica, and the Pensylvania coffee-houses; and of any bookseller in Great Britain, 1764). ESTC: Leeds, NLS, Glasgow, St Andrews, U Kentucky, UVA, Saint Olaf (MN) and State Library of Tasmania.

First edition with the Lydis illustrations, of Colette’s coming-of-age novel (first published in 1900-3 with debatable contribution from her then-husband, Willy). This is copy number 88 of 100 on pur fil Lafuma with plates in 2 states, after copies on Japon and Hollande, of a total edition of 1585 copies on different papers. There was mutual admiration (and perhaps more) between Colette and Lydis, the former having written an admiring note on the artist for the programme of the 1934 Bal des petits lits blancs, which Lydis had illustrated.

A rare physionotrace portrait of Henry Walter Livingston (June 12, 1768 – December 22, 1810) a United States Representative from the state of New York. He graduated from Yale College in 1786 where he studied law and was admitted to the bar and commenced practice in New York City. He was private secretary to Gouverneur Morris, American Minister Plenipotentiary to Paris, France, 1792-1794; judge of the court of common pleas of Columbia County, N.Y.; member of the State assembly in 1802 and again in 1810; elected as a Federalist to the Eighth and Ninth Congresses (March 4, 1803-March 3, 1807). He died at his home in Livingston, New York on December 22, 1810 and is interred with his wife in a vault there.

Before the advent of photography the physionotrace was ‘the first system invented to produce multiple copies of a portrait, invented in 1786 by Gilles-Louis Chrétien (1774–1811). In his apparatus a profile cast by a lamp onto a glass plate was traced by an operator using a pointer connected, by a system of levers like a pantograph, to an engraving tool moving over a copper plate. The aquatint and roulette finished engraved intaglio plate, usually circular and small (50 mm), with details of features and costume, could be inked and printed many times’ (Photoconservation.com, sub Printing Processes). The process was introduced to America by Charles Saint-Mémin.

The miniaturist Saint-Mémin (1770-1852) had emigrated from France in 1793 to Switzerland, where he practised as an engraver. Crossing the Atlantic to Canada and then the United States, he established a portrait business in New York with his compatriot Thomas Bluget de Valdenuit (who initially produced the drawings for Saint-Mémin to engrave). When Valdenuit returned to Paris, Saint-Mémin adopted an itinerant practice all over the East Coast states, working variously at Philadelphia, Richmond, Charleston and Burlington. He too returned to France in 1814, having destroyed his drawing apparatus in a symbolic end to a prolific artistic enterprise which produced more than a thousand different portraits of significant figures in American society, including Washington, Revere and Jefferson.

A rare physionotrace portrait of David Watson (1773–1830) was a lawyer, educated at William & Mary College (1796-1797) and (with Jefferson) a member of the first Board of Visitors of the University of Virginia in 1817. He and known to have been a confidant of Thomas Jefferson and other notable figures of the period. He was elected six times to the General Assembly and represented Louisa County at the 1829 Constitutional Convention.

Before the advent of photography the physionotrace was ‘the first system invented to produce multiple copies of a portrait, invented in 1786 by Gilles-Louis Chrétien (1774–1811). In his apparatus a profile cast by a lamp onto a glass plate was traced by an operator using a pointer connected, by a system of levers like a pantograph, to an engraving tool moving over a copper plate. The aquatint and roulette finished engraved intaglio plate, usually circular and small (50 mm), with details of features and costume, could be inked and printed many times’ (Photoconservation.com, sub Printing Processes). The process was introduced to America by Charles Saint-Mémin.

The miniaturist Saint-Mémin (1770-1852) had emigrated from France in 1793 to Switzerland, where he practised as an engraver. Crossing the Atlantic to Canada and then the United States, he established a portrait business in New York with his compatriot Thomas Bluget de Valdenuit (who initially produced the drawings for Saint-Mémin to engrave). When Valdenuit returned to Paris, Saint-Mémin adopted an itinerant practice all over the East Coast states, working variously at Philadelphia, Richmond, Charleston and Burlington. He too returned to France in 1814, having destroyed his drawing apparatus in a symbolic end to a prolific artistic enterprise which produced more than a thousand different portraits of significant figures in American society, including Washington, Revere and Jefferson.

First edition of this Covenanter propaganda pamphlet of the era of the Bishops’ Wars, purporting to offer intelligence as to the parlous and divisive state of the English nation, particularly the English forces, who the author ‘L.D.’ claims to have infiltrated. It is full of fascinating gossip and opinion, albeit mainly fictional, sometimes in verse form.

‘What will you fight for a Booke of Common Prayer?
What will you fight for a Court of High Commission?.... [English]
Wee fight to have our true Religion stand:
Wee fight to keepe our Lawes unvilified...’ [Scots].

The spy-narrator recounts various sorties into England. At Canterbury he visits Becket’s tomb and scrawls on the cathedral wall, hears a sermon at Lambeth, visits Guy Fawkes’s house and reports a dissolute Whitehall, with the King having fled. Wing L10 (another edition of 22 pages is L11); Thomason E.153[22].

A superb ‘game of goose’ on the theme of the peoples of the known world, with fine engraved corner vignettes representing Africa, America, Europe and Asia and 63 vignettes representing different peoples. They include native Americans (of California, Mexico, the Amazon, Iroquois, Brazil, Chile, Tierra del Fuego, Paraguay and Nootka Island), inhabitants of Java, Sumatra, China, Japan, Tahiti, Australia (Nouvelle Hollande) and New Zealand, as well as Africa, the Middle East and Europe. In common with other games of this type, the cultural attitudes represented by the symbolism and mode of play is worthy of decoding. With dice and counters, the players are to navigate (culturally, not geographically) from China (evidently still at the furthest reaches of the European geographical imagination) to France, via the 63 numbered squares, with their various characteristics, advantages and disadvantages. Mexico (square 6) is shown as a bridge and players landing there jump straight to square 12 (the Amazon); at 19 (Tahiti) the islanders’ hospitality detains players for two turns; at 31 (Siberia) the players waits in exile until another player reaches the same square and rescues them, at square 42, traditionally the ‘puzzle’ square (Japan) the player is refused landing and goes back to 30 (Abyssinia) and just before the end, square 58 (New Zealand) the player encounters the reputed anthrophages (man-eaters) and returns to the start. Ciompi/Seville Collection 32; Adrian Seville, ‘The geographical Jeux de l'Oie of Europe. Les Jeux de l’Oie géographiques de l’Europe’, Belgeo, 3-4, 2008, 427-444 (56).

First edition of this British political satire, co-opting Aesop’s animals of in a series of witty verses, capitalising on the popularity of the Aesop in English via the editions of Ogilby and L’Estrange. ‘In 1698 a whole series of fables began to appear anonymously which set Aesop on a journey through England and the rest of Europe. He comments through his animal characters about the Jacobite threat, William’s government of England, and Louis XIV’s ambitions on the continent. As one writer put it, “It is now the Mode, it seems, for Brutes to turn Politicians,” and Aesop was chosen as their main expositor. Aesop at Tunbridge (1698) was a structured attack on William and on Whig principles in general. In the same year Aesop at Bath criticized the Jacobites; Aesop Return d from Tunbridge committed the hapless supporter of the Jacobites to Bedlam; Old Aesop at Whitehall defended the government; and Aesop at Amsterdam objected to the very monarchical forms of government supported in one way or another by Whig, Tory, and Jacobite factions’ (Daniel, ‘Political and Philosophical Uses of Fables in eighteenth-century England’, The Eighteenth Century, 23, 2, 1982, p. 153).
Wing O196. ESTC lists US copies at Clark (UCLA), Folger, Harvard, Cincinnati and Texas.

First edition, presentation copy. A witty imaginary Voyage autor de ma chambre in the spirit of Le Maistre. In just nine steps the author circumnavigates his room, bumping into Napoleon and traversing Europe. There are verses, riddles, enigmas and an acrostic on the Swedish succession: ‘Charles Jean Prince Royal de Suede’. The ninth step is a long verse dedicated to the elderly British King George III. The allegorical plate depicts voyagers in an elegant state of undress on the back of a flying horse. The dedicatee of this presentation copy is Maria Juliana Wahrendorff von Rosen (1763-1820). Worldcat locates the Yale copy only in the US. JISC/Copac lists no UK copies.

First edition of this very scarce novel by a significant British Catholic author. She was born Gertrude Hext in Cornwall in 1812 and became a Catholic in 1844. A review of Edith Mortimer in The Rambler enthused: ‘Mrs. Parsons is one of our best writers of Catholic fiction. There is a heartiness and energy about almost every thing that comes from her pen...’

‘A deeply religious woman, Gertrude Parsons was charitable to the poor and a leading benefactor of the mission at Little Malvern. Gertrude Parsons’s enthusiastic commitment to her adopted faith was most apparent, however, in many of her published works. Thornberry Abbey (1846), in which the heroine and her clergyman fiancé are both converted to Catholicism, is clearly semi-autobiographical. In another early novel, Edith Mortimer, or, The Trials of Life (1857), a young Roman Catholic convert learns to conquer her pride, breaking off her engagement to a rich protestant cousin. In the 1860s Gertrude Parsons wrote four tract tales for Burns and Oates’s Tales and Narrative series, which was aimed at a working-class audience; these included Lent Lilies and The Muffin Girl’ (Rosemary Mitchell in Oxford DNB). WorldCat lists US copies at Brigham Young and Huntington only.

One of Heath’s famous graphic satires on the theme of The March of Intellect, which expressed contemporary anxiety over technological progress and social change in England brought about by science, education, industrialisation and commercialisation. This one shows a London street corner at the edge of open country and the sea, with numerous figures, including a street-sweeper, horse-drawn carriage, two men playing chess, musicians and singers and street-sellers, with wealthy figures being sent down a mechanical lift beside giant shop window stuffed with milliner. A steam carriage full of redcoat soldiers is seen in background, along with passenger balloons and a flying warship (raining canon-fire at ships below) in the air beside bridge crossing the English Channel between Dover and Calais.

First edition of this observational survey of the solar system, including the earliest accurate maps of the surface of Mars, establishing the discipline of aerography (a derivation form ‘Ares’ the Greek god of Mars). Wilhelm Beer and Johan Mädler made systematic telescopic observations of Mars from 1830, the year in which the planet passed closest to earth. Their goal was to refine Herschel’s calculations of its period of rotation — just over 24 hours — which had prompted speculation about the red planet’s similarities to our own. In doing so they made a close survey of spots and other markings, trying to understand those which might give clues to the composition of the Martian surface and those which were atmospheric and created the drawings on which the Mars plates in the Fragments were prepared. They were accurate enough to plainly ‘distinguish the two most notable features of Mars Syrtis Major (looking like India), and Lacus Solis (looking like a large eye)’ (Ashworth, Linda Hall website https://www.lindahall.org/about/news/scientist-of-the-day/wilhelm-beer/). The multiple small diagrams of Mars on 6 plates appear for the first time, while the larger double-hemisphere plate had previously appeared in a journal article in Astronomische Nachrichten of 1838. The book was published in German in 1841 as Beiträge zur physischen Kenntniss der himmlischen Körper im Sonnensysteme. Both authors contributions are commemorated with Martian craters named after them.
Houzeau and Lancaster 1332.

[bound with:] [CORNÉ, J. J.]. Album du dessinateur en cheveux, [Paris, n.d., c. 1840s]. ff. 8 lithographed plates. Soiled, some old repairs to versos. One further additional lithograph design (smaller) bound in at end. Contemporary quarter roan (worn). Evidently well used, but still good copies.

Two exceptionally rare albums of designs by Parisian hair artists — not hairdressers but creators of popular memorial and funerary pictures created from the cut hair of the deceased of which numerous examples are depicted here. The Hanssen album has an additional price list (including prices for frames); the Corné album is without a title-page (it is unclear if it was issued thus). Both artists are mentioned by André Chanlot in Les Ouvrages en cheveux; leurs secrets, p. 36. Chanlot dates the Corné album to c. 1845 and records the death of Hanssen in 1846. Exceptionally Rare. Worlcat lists three copies of the Hanssen album (all in France) and none of the Corné.

First edition of this extensive pocket guide to London, England and Wales for a juvenile audience. The description of London is admirably complete, with notes on the principal monuments as well as its people and customs (‘The Lord of Merry Disports’ and ‘Itinerant Musicians’ among them). The plates (originally appearing London, or interesting Memorials published by Thomas Boys in London in 1823) depict The Custom House, Somerset House, Hanover Terrace and Westminster Abbey. Adams, London illustrated, 1604-1851 (1983), 150. No US copies in Worldcat and JISC/COPAC records the Bishopsgate Institute and Bodley copies only.

First edition with this title and introductory part, a very rare opportunistic edition of Lettres Portuguaises, which found itself onto the Index librorum prohibitorum in 1727. The epistolary novel Lettres Portugaises was one of the publishing sensations of the late seventeenth century and beyond, first published in Paris in 1669, purporting to be the genuine letters between a Portugese nun, Mariana Alcoforado, and the French nobleman, the Marquis de Chamilly. Despite its passionate tone it was not outlawed and indeed it was widely reprinted and set the tone for much of the sentimental and epistolary fiction of the eighteenth century. Though the letters have been proved to be fictional, both parties were real.

This edition, probably clandestine, seems to have been a step too far in the eyes of the censors. Apparently a reissue of the sheets of a 1696 Lyon edition, it was augmented with a 48-page prequel in which the first encounters between Maria and the Marquis in Portugal are recounted. This text was cast as a seduction scene, in which the young nun entertained the Marquis in a private apartment beside her cloister, dressed in a pale blue nightgown adorned with red ribbons. Suppression seems to have been effective and it is unrecorded in public collections, as far as we can tell, besides a single copy in the library at Bourg-en-Bresse. Gay mentions it among the reprints of Lettres Portugaises, citing a copy offered for sale in Paris in 1869. Gay II, 847. Not found in Worldcat.