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First edition of this very rare collection devoted to the street life of Paris, as observed by an imagined flâneur, some thirty years before Baudelaire defined the characteristics of the archetypal literary and aesthetic wanderer. The plates depict various familiar and unfamiliar aspects of Paris life — the title plate depicts the widow Lagarde, a dog and cat groomer, while other plates show browsers at a book stall in the Rue de Grès, walkers in the Luxembourg gardens, female basket carriers at la Halle, various vendors and hawker and fashionable women in the Boulevard de l’Opera. Complete sets are exceptionally rare (the British Museum catalogue lists only four of the series, for example).

Forest was a prolific caricaturist, working alongside both Grandville and Daumier for satirical journals such as La Silhouette and La Caricature. WorldCat lists only the Morgan copy (Michael Sadleir; from the library of Gordon N. Ray). Inventaire du fonds français après 1800, v. VIII, p. 101

A delightful reliure parlante depicting the statue of the so-called Black Madonna, an object of veneration for countless pilgrims, here binding two works printed at the shrine of Maria Einsidel, at Einsiedeln Abbey near Zurich. The Abbey, originally the hermitage of the ninth-century St Meinrad, became a major pilgrimage destination, attracting pilgrims to its Chapel of Grace, reputed by legend to have been consecrated by angels or by Christ himself. The central focus of the pilgrimage was (and still is) the fifteenth-century statue of the Black Madonna or ‘Our Lady of the Hermits’, successor to a much older image associated with St Meinrad himself. The Abbey became a significant centre for printing and several printers produced books, images and pamphlets for pilgrims there, but surviving bindings, presumably made there too, are rare.

‘The history of the Einsiedeln figure is somewhat convoluted: it is thought to have been carved about 1450, replacing a much older, seated Madonna. In 1798, the statue was secreted through Switzerland and Austria to protect it from the invading French army. It was uncovered the following year and given to the restorer Johann Adam Fuetscher, who describes having “repainted” the black face. It is assumed the original statue did have light, pink-colored skin, but the figure is thought to have turned black long before its restoration. While many sources further the idea that the statue was darkened from years of exposure to the flames and smoke from nearby candles, the image of the Black Madonna is nonetheless a distinct object of worship and pilgrimage’ (Hanna Siesel, The Frick Collection blog, September 16, 2016).

Afia Rezk, a Syrian textile artist now living and working in Paris, creates large scale textile installations using traditional weaving techniques. Here she has combined woven textile with monotypes printed from textiles to create a haunting artist’s book meditating on her own personal narratives woven into text/ile. Afia Rezk was born in 1980. She arrived in France with her family in May 2018. From childhood, influenced by Syrian crafts, she has used organic elements, living materials in constant mutation under the effect of oxidation, reduction and biodegradation. Her plastic research combines painting, collage, print, ceramics, weaving and installation. She studied Arabic literature at Damascus University before turning to the visual arts; she worked extensively in Syria before fleeing the war, leading workshops in both art and theatre as interactive practices to help families in emergency situations, as well as children and female victims of war. She exhibited in Syria, Lebanon, France, Sweden and Germany and is a member the Agency of Artists in Exile in France.

Number 87 of 145 copies on Arches (after 22 on Japon, total edition 167, plus 25 reserved copies) of this stylish art deco interpretation of the French courtly poem of the thirteenth century, with illustrations by Robert Bonfils (the last finished by hand). The text is parallel, with the original on the left and Bédier’s modern French version on the right.

The binding by Franz Ostermann, called ‘Franz’ (1839-1938) is a superb art deco counterpart to the text, taking as its cue the chevron borders of the text. The chevrons are delineated by broad bands with with applied gold leaf, over a ground of grey and black morocco panels. The central panel is reserved for lozenges of grey and gold paper and overlaid marbled paper. It is a striking masterpiece of the mature years of ‘Franz’, a binder who had participated in most of the major strands of decorative arts in France from the last quarter of the nineteenth century to the art deco period. Fléty, Dictionnaire des relieurs français 138; Peyré, Histoire de la reliure de création, 189.

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.

An intriguing homemade book created by an aspiring young writer, copying extracts from a popular juvenile title, Marmaduke Multiply, published in 1817 and designed to teach multiplication with engaging illustrations. In this version, a Francis (or possibly Frances) Taylor has copied extracts from the book using different hands, without much thought to order. Some are captioned ‘with my left hand’, another ‘half with my right hand’ as though he or she were deciding which was the best hand, or simply trying writing and drawing with an unfamiliar hand. Given the general insistence on right hand writing in the period it is an unusual survival, albeit rudimentary, an evidence of active learning activities in the acquisition of early literacy.

First edition of this rare manual for Giacometti’s evolution of the game of chess Il Giuoco della guerra which uses a board game format to teach the principles of military strategy, tactics, and fortification. It belongs to a genre of military games that developed in Europe during the eighteenth century — precursors to the Prussian Kriegsspiel and of modern board-based wargames. The pieces had names such as ‘generals’, ‘cannons’, ‘mortars’ and fortresses’. The engraved plate, dedicated by Pietro Remondini to the Cavaliere Brancaleone shows the field of battle, with double chess boards, separated by a symbolic river, all within an elaborate classical border of panelled friezes. The engraved frontispiece shows two allegorical female figures representing strategic warfare and honour or victory), flanking a large shield bearing a crowned eagle and a plinth bearing the double-headed image of Janus is behind.
It was reprinted several times and translated into French. WorldCat: Cleveland Public Library, Bodley, Dutch National Library only.

First edition, one of 176, copy number 53 for collector Armand Durand, an excellent copy of a fragile production, rarely preserved in this state. It was later in the collection of André Barrier, president of the Cent Bibliophiles. An elaborate fin-de-siècle precursor to Carter’s ABC, Uzanne’s Dictionnaire bibliophilosophique has entries for all the major aspects of book production from the author, to publishing, printing, binding and marketing, of collecting and of reading. Memorably referred to as the ‘high priest of fin-de-siècle bibliophilia’ (Silverman, The New Bibliopolis, p. 14) Uzanne explored new technologies to create luxurious and appealing formats for his books, with innovative papers and printing techniques combined with design by artists such as Georges De Feure, who provided the striking art nouveau green jacket here (Millmann, Georges de Feure Maitre du Symbolisme et de l'Art Nouveau, Paris, 1992, p. 141). The japon paper for the text is watermarked throughout with a floral design by Léon Rudnicki. With a limitation of just 176 copies, it is one of Uzanne’s rarer productions, especially so in original condition. Carteret V, p. 189 (’Édition recherchée’).

Bernard Hoepffner (1946-2017) was a noted French translator of ‘difficult’ works in English, a major part of he European literary landscape, who counted works by Joyce, Orwell, Twain, Melville, Amis, Philip Sidney, Seamus Heaney among his many acclaimed translations. Polymathic and largely self-taught as a translator, he had trained as an architect. It was presumably during this training that he created this unique and unpublished collection of abstract designs in indian in and watercolour. Each of the 20 designs bears a title: naissance, espoir déçu, reflets d’une pensée, être agressif, être passif, un desolé, perspective, rêve, rather like a set of enigmatic tarot cards for reflection and meditation. He dedicates it ‘à Dazet, vers Jean, pour Abis’. By way of a preface he simply types ‘Pas de préface’, and as a postface he writes: ‘il ne faut pas confondre Minotaure avec Minautaure’ and gives a date of 29 April 1965’.

Hoepffner spent many years in Britain, first moving there as a young man. He worked variously a furniture restorer and smallholder, before finding his vocation as a translator. He served a president of ATLAS (Association
for the Promotion of Literary Translation) and died tragically at the age of 71, swept from rocks by the sea near his home in Pembrokeshire in 2017.

One of the strangest memorials of the Great War and one of the best known works by the nuns of Maredret, celebrated revivalists of the medieval art of manuscript illumination. The pastoral letter of Cardinal Mercier archbishop of Malines/Mechelen was addressed to the clergy and faithful of his diocese in the early months of the Great War, when Belgium was facing the terrible consequences of a German occupation, to encourage courage, fortitude and patriotic duty. Its text was taken by the two most talented nuns of the abbey of Maredret (near Namur), Agnès Desclée and Marie-Madeleine Kerger, and transcribed and illuminated under the most terrifying circumstances. The sheets were at one point hidden in a double-bottomed pig trough to evade discovery during the German occupation. The illumination records in medieval idiom key episodes of Belgium’s trials between 1914 and 191 — including the devastation of Aarschot, Dinant and Tamines, the execution of civilians, the burning of the halls and library of the University of Louvain as well as relief received from the United States. The medieval figures and scenes have subtle (even humorous) modernisations - notably the addition of modern Belgian, British and American flags, while the monstrous Krupp guns are rendered as canons. In each plate, the scenes are explained with brief captions on the tissue guards.

The manuscript was reproduced after the war and issued in this 1921 edition, the prefatory text in either French or English (this copy in French) and sent to supporters around the world, notably in the United States. This copy is one of the 750 numbered copies on Hollande (after 500 on Japon).

J.P. Morgan in New York was to become one of the nuns’ most effective patrons in the years following the war, notably purchasing their Messe pour les Époux made in 1915 in 1921. He had been introduced to the abbey by the head of the British Museum, Frederic George Kenyon via Belle da Costa Greene. The original manuscript of the pastoral letter remains at Maredret (classified a national ‘trésor’ in 2015), while the British Library holds a manuscript copy of a single page (Add MS 40082). The work of the Maredret nuns and the genesis of this book is described by Dominique Vanwijnsberghe, ‘Un Art très monastique. L’atelier des bénédictines de Maredret de 1893 à 1940] in Thomas Coomans and Jan de Maeyer (eds.) Renaissance de l'enluminure médiévale. Manuscrits et enluminures belges du XIXe siècle et leur contexte européen. Leuven University Press, Leuven 2007, pp. 295-309.

One of several designs created by the artist for her own ex libris, this one with a scrolling arabesque device to the upper portion and her name in full below, with the strokes of every letter terminating in a cross.

One of several designs created by the artist for her own ex libris, this one with a vulture and a cobra, reminiscent of several of her miniature paintings in the orientalist style from the same period.

One of several designs created by the artist for her own ex libris, this one with a three-barred cross resembling the Maronite cross and the artist’s initials in an omega shaped cartouche at the foot. She gives her full name on a scroll at the foot. We have hitherto found no record of Mariette Lydis’ bookplate, nor indeed of books belonging to her, either with or without bookplates.

One of several designs created by the artist for her own ex libris, this one with an intertwining vine and two female deer, and the artist’s name on a scroll. We have hitherto found no record of Mariette Lydis’ bookplate, nor indeed of books belonging to her, either with or without bookplates.

First edition of Mariette Lydis’s first book, number 70 of 100 copies on thick handmade paper and bound in bright yellow ‘duvetine’ cloth (the limitation notice mentions copies are either in ‘duvetine’ or in Chinese silk), complete with rare original box. Though described on the title as Chinese stories by Balàzs illustrated by Lydis, in fact the illustrations came first, with the 16 fables added in response — so the book is in effect a series of pictures ‘illustrated’ with text. Its genesis lay with Lydis (then Marietta Pachoffer-Karñy) and her friend, the Viennese progressive educationalist Eugenie Schwarzwald, who approached the Hungarian emigré poet and aesthetician Balàzs (who had composed the libretto for Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle in 1911) to write a text so that a book could be published. In order to have it ready for Christmas he had to write the sixteen tales in just three weeks, producing a series of strange and sometimes chilling tales true to the striking orientalism of the images. It was a great success — Thomas Mann extolled it as ‘a beautiful book’ in a press review, while a modern critic writes: ‘Not surprisingly [Balàzs] stuck to his favorite theme — human alienation... In these fables, Balàzs suggested that men could only unite with women in the utopian world of dreams and longing’. (Congdon, Exiles and Social Thought: Hungarian Intellectuals in Germany, 2014, p. 104). Der Mantel der Träume has more recently been published in English as The Cloak of Dreams (Princeton, 2010).

The sixteen illustrations and fables are: Der Mantel der Träume; Li-Tai-Pe und der Dieb; Die Sonnenschirme; Der ungeschickte Gott; Die Opiumraucher; Der Floh; Das Alte Kind; Die Gottesräuber; Li-Tai-Pe und der Frühling; Die Ahnen; Der Mondfisch; Die Freunde; Die Rache des Kastanienbaumes; Tränenblick; Das Lehmkind and Der Sieger. The 20 illustrations are from watercolour miniatures and reproduce dates (Lugano 1921-2) and the artist’s initials ‘M.P.K’ [for Marietta Pachoffer-Karñy, from her first marriage in 1910 to Austrian businessman Julius Koloman Pachoffer-Karñy, who died April 1922].

First edition, tirage de tête, one of 20 copies on japon with two suites (followed by 50 on hollande and 150 on arches, total edition 220 copies). Mariette Lydis supplied a portrait lithograph for this stylish alphabetic collection of texts and illustrations devoted to 26 imaginary women. She illustrates ‘Therèse’, a pale, alienated young woman, to illustrate a short text by Francis de Miomandre lamenting the quotidian life of a northern housewife confined to domesticity despite dreams of a more passionate existence. The other texts include contributions from Henri de Regnier, Giraudoux, la Comtesse de Noailles, Colette, Mac Orlan and Mauriac, and the illustrations include lithographs by Dunoyer de Segonzac, Dufy, Marie Laurencin, Lydis, Daragnès, and Laborde. This is copy 131 of 150 on Arches (after 20 on Japon and 50 on Hollande).

The striking and accomplished binding bears the stamp of Louise Pinard, daughter and successor of the Parisian binder Lucien Durvand (1852-1924). After his death in 1924 his daughter Louise continued to produce bindings until 1934, possibly the date of her own death.

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).

First editions of both text and plates, this copy with the artist’s signature and additional pencil extracts from the text added in pencil to the lower margins of each plate.

Govone printed 353 copies of his large-format Baudelaire in 1928, together with just 125 copies of an accompanying suite of etched plates by Lydis. This left over 200 copies of the text un-illustrated, many of which were unsold by 1935, when Lydis prepared a new suite of plates for them - the present 33 hand-coloured plates. The text volume was reissued in new wrappers and paired with the new plates. This copy of the text is number 173 of the 290 copies on hollande, and the 33 plates are all signed in pencil.

The reissue of the 1928 text with the 1935 plates has been a frequent cause of bibliographic confusion, with the highly distinctive plates often catalogued as dating from 1928. They do not, and are entirely different from Lydis’ earlier suite.

First edition, one 353 copies of the text and just 125 of the plates (both volumes numbered 11) with all plates signed by Mariette Lydis and in their coloured state, generally considered Mariette Lydis’ finest book. The text volume contains a facsimile of Baudelaire’s self portrait and a page of facsimile of his manuscript, both from the collection of Armand Godoy, as well as the loose leaf ‘Prière d’inserer...’ by Jean Royère’, the latter not always preserved. The artist created a further sequence of coloured drawings for Les Fleurs du Mal in the 1930s issued as lithographs in 1935. These reproductions were frequently bound up with remaining copies of the 1928 text volume, causing confusion among cataloguers, with these hybrid 1928/33 volumes habitually dated 1928 without further comment. The 1935 illustrations have none of the sparse intensity of Lydis’ 1928 sequence of etched plates. Carteret IV, 63: ‘Ensemble recherchée et cotée. Une des meilleures illustrations de l’artiste’.

A superb illuminated Ten Commandments, with the German text in calligraphic gothic script, beneath a title ‘Die Zehn Gebote Gottes’ arranged on a rainbow forming a partially arched top to the sheet. The background contains a rich array of iconography in the style of a medieval manuscript, including Adam and Eve in paradise at the head on a decorated gold background, God in the heavens (with sun, moon and star), personifications of each of the sins, all arranged around a central tree of life linking heaven and earth. The central scene, on a silver mandala is a betrothal or wedding scene. Perhaps most striking of all is the rich azure ground, stippled with silver and overlaid with scrolling branches and leaves, inhabited by birds and animals. It is a splendid example of late nineteenth-century medievalism, and the revival of the art of manuscript illumination, experienced in Germany as much as in other European countries, especially in the context of the revival of Roman Catholicism. The revival in Germany has been studied in detail by Michela Braesel (see ‘Medieval Elements in Nineteenth-Century German Illumination. Context and Models’ in The Revival of Medieval Illumination, ed. Thomas Coomans & Jan de Maeyer, Leuven, 2007). Little more has been discovered of the artist and the recipient, except that they were both members of a large Bingen family, of who several members appear to have emigrated to the United States.