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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.

Copy number one, with twelve original watercolour drawings by George Barbier (including those for the wrappers), a grand papier copy printed on vieux japon, and a double suite of illustrations (on chine and japon, one in colour one in outline). This is the first of the three special tirage de tête copies, each containing one third of the thirty-six original Barbier watercolours, this the primary copy, with cover designs. The total edition was of 1091 copies on various papers.

This is one of Barbier’s last illustrative works – he died in 1932 at the age of 50 and at the height of his celebrity, already recognised as one of the greatest French illustrators of his century and subsequently regarded as a father of the Art Deco movement. Gautier’s orientalist novel provided the perfect inspiration for Barbier’s ambiguously eroticised designs, including one of the most immediately recognisable wrapper designs of the era. His finely-wrought watercolours were reduced in reproduction (though not the signed original of the cover) and they retain pencil notes and guidelines for preparing Eugène Gasperini’s woodblocks.

Barbier’s many jewel-like designs for fashion and the ballet and his book illustrations have long been collectible, of course, and he has more recently been the object of a gradual reclamation as a gay artist (despite an absence of any concrete evidence of his sexuality). It is notable he left so little by way of biographical record, and that he was to some extent overlooked or forgotten in the years following his untimely death, leading some commentators to infer a concealed sexuality. ‘Contributing to his disappearance were his own reticence and a surprising sparseness of biographical information. Born into a prosperous bourgeois family in the provincial town of Nantes, he lived a clearly very different lifestyle in Paris, where he frequented unmistakably, if not exclusively, homosexual circles - he was, for example, an intimate of the dandy and poet Robert de Montesquiou, who introduced him to Marcel Proust’, Roderick Conway Morris, ‘Forgotten Art of French illustrator George Barbier’, The New York Times, Nov. 14 2008.

Gautier’s Roman de la Momie was first published in 1857 and is a quintessential Orientalist fantasy, striking in recounting the discovery of a fully preserved female pharaoh in the Valley of the Kings by an English and a German Egypotologist. The mummy is identified as a queen, Tahoser, and a combination of hieroglyphics in the chamber and a papyrus scroll reveals her story.

The superb binding is by Cretté (1893-1969), ‘one of the Ecole Estienne’s most brilliant pupils... [who] after graduating joined Marius Michel’s studio, eventually taking over a month before the master’s death in 1925’ (Duncan and de Bartha, Art Nouveau and Art Deco Bookbinding. The French Masterpieces 1880-1940, 1989).

First edition, in a superb geometric binding by Henri Creuzevault. This is copy III of 5 copies on vieux japon (of a total edition of only 45 copies, the remainder on japon imperial), bound without the additional suite on chine. All the plates are signed in pencil. Sappho is one of Mariette Lydis’s rarest books, and among the most provocative, with its large format plates demonstrating her mastery of the etched line. Still under-appreciated and under-represented in institutional collections, Lydis is one of the most intriguing artistic figures of her era. Her youth in bourgeois Jewish Vienna was followed by travels across Europe, Africa and later England, the USA and South America. She settled in Paris in the 1920s (later describing the city as ‘the only place where it is possible to forget the brutality of men’) where she embraced the fluidity of culture and sexuality she found there. Though married three times (the last to publisher Giuseppe Govone, with whom she jointly published Sappho) she was openly bisexual. Her flight from Europe to Argentina in 1940 and subsequent isolation from European collectors and artistic movements perhaps served to obscure the astonishing range of her graphic art in the twenties and thirties.

The contemporary binding of this copy is an especially striking example of the art deco architectural style of Henri Creuzevault (1905-1971), among the most prominent and celebrated Parisian binders of the immediate pre-war era. Camille Creuzevault illustrates an almost identical binding on a copy of Pierre Louys’ Aphrodite of 1936 (Henri Creuzevault, II, 59). ‘Henri Creuzevault intended to be a painter but in 1918 he learned the craft of leather-gilding and then entered the binding studio of his father Louis Lazare Creuzevault. During his military service in the Middle East in 1925, he again took up painting and drawing. The following year, back in his father's studio, he drew his first sketches and exhibited his bindings at the Musée Galliera where he won first prize in 1928. Creuzevault’s art, always highly rigorous, developed throughout his life. His early style was fairly sober and traditional, progressing in the 1930s to compositions in the style of Art Deco, and 10 years later returning to an austere Classicism before the production of his bold works of the 1950s... ’ (Benezit).

Worldcat lists copies at Cornell, Harvard and Bibliothèque nationale only (there are also copies at Edinburgh University and the National Gallery of Scotland).

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 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, 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 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 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.

First edition, preserved in original wrappers, of this popular and critically-acclaimed roman de moeurs. It was widely-read around Europe and, interestingly, appeared on the advert leaves of numerous English books (in its original French). The Quarterly Review commented: ‘M. Picard is well known to be the most celebrated dramatic writer in France. The French Critics have pronounced this to be one of the best novels that has appeared since Gil Blas’ (1815). Picard was variously a playwright, actor, novelist, poet and musical director in Paris.

First edition of an ingenious perpetual calendar, serviceable to the year 2000. and including a folding engraved lunar chart. The preface suggests its utility to ‘l’Homme d’État, le Magistrat, l’Homme de Lettres, le Particulier même’. Duplessis was a map publisher, who also issued a variety of calendars. The advert after the preface offers geographical and historical maps and charts, a large map of France on 175 sheets but also calendar mounted on card with elaborate engraved borders which could be supplied glazed in gilt frames. No US or UK copies in Worldcat.

A delightful, accomplished and idsiosyncratic illuminated manuscript in neo-gothic style by a French woman, one Sophie Mallet, probably as a wedding gift for a female friend or relation: Jeanne or ‘JMN’. The texts include familiar words of advice for a young wife, scriptural and otherwise, while a section titled ‘Vie du monde’ includes personal and original advice addressed to ‘ma Jeanne’. Among the texts are: ‘Qui trouvera une femme forte?...’ (Proverbs 31 [incorrectly given as Ecclesiasticus here], ‘Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies’); ‘Bienheureux les pauvres d’esprit...’ (Matthew 5, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven); ‘Faites comme les petits enfants qui de l’une des mains se tiennent à leur père’ (St Francis of Assisi, ‘Suffer Little Children to Come Unto Me’), and there are excerpts from the Imitation of Christ and from St Bernard.

The real pleasure of the manuscript lies in its illumination, expertly done with unusual and quirky details. The borders include numerous recognisable birds, insects and flowers rendered in impressive detail. Colours are applied very skilfully as are metallic highlights, including burnished and liquid gold, often on raised or otherwise textured grounds. Best of all is the colophon or tailpiece, which includes an entwined pair of longtailed dragons looking more like dinosaurs than medieval beasts.

First edition. In this polemical work the Republican, Constant warned the French people of the consequences of a potential restoration of the monarchy in France. He considers the undesirable consequences of the British Restoration and cites the histories of Clarendon, Hume, Burnet and Ludlow, often giving footnote excerpts in English. It was published shortly before the events of the 18th Brumaire and in the year Constant was also translating Godwin. The manuscript corrections in this copy appear to be editorial. Cioranescu 20698. Worldcat gives US copies at the University of Connecticut, Harvard, Michigan State, Missouri and American Philosophical Society.

First edition of this collection with the Lydis illustrations. Number 152 of 165 copies. Chant des Amazones is a celebration of female athleticism in verse, prose and image, Chant des Amazones is a celebration of female athleticism in verse, prose and image and is dedicated to ‘une jeune fille victorieuse dans la course des 1,000 mètres’. The texts are drawn from Montherlant’s Les Onze devant la porte dorée (1924) which he had written against the background of preparations for the 1924 Paris Olympics. Women’s participation in Olympic athletics was then extremely limited, but the decade after 1924 witnessed its rapid expansion and a general enthusiasm for women’s sport, reflected in this book. Well-known as a writer, Montherlant was an important contact for Lydis throughout her career though his posthumous reputation has revealed him as a serial pederast and dabbler in right-wing politics. His later works were marked by distinct anti-feminism and misogyny. Lydis’ illustrations are fresh and well-meaning, but her evident sexualisation of pubescent girls is troubling to the modern eye. The book was issued in handsome silver, green and turquoise lithographed wrappers.

First edition with the Lydis illustrations. One of a total edition of 131 copies, this one of the 115 on papier de Rives). The illustrations, many in the style of illuminated miniatures or icons are transformed through brilliant pochoir colouring executed in the workshop of master colourist Jean Saude, reproducing the artist’s signature on each.

These verse litanies, after the traditional catholic Marian litany, are entirely the creation of Armand Godoy and were first published (unillustrated) in 1930. 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 lists copies at Princeton and Bridwell only outside continental Europe.

One of 125 copies only of this original print from Dix Eaux-fortes pour illustrer Les Fleurs du Mal, Paris, 1928.

One of 125 copies only of this original print from Dix Eaux-fortes pour illustrer Les Fleurs du Mal, Paris, 1928.

One of 125 copies only of this original print from Dix Eaux-fortes pour illustrer Les Fleurs du Mal, Paris, 1928.

One of 125 copies only of this original print from Dix Eaux-fortes pour illustrer Les Fleurs du Mal, Paris, 1928.