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First edition of this collection, one of 150 (after 50 copies with coloured plates). ‘Lettre à la Présidente’ recounting Gautier’s sexual exploits in Italy was addressed to Madame Sabatier, hostess of a literary salon frequented by Gautier. It had been first published clandestinely in 1890. Here it is presented with other obscene fragments, including hitherto unpublished verse, with the celebrated sequence of erotic plates by Van Maele.

Maurice François Alfred Martin van Miële (12 October 1863 – 5 September 1926) worked in both Brussels and Paris, and is especially associated with the clandestine publications of Charles Carrington. Dutel 608; Kearney, Private Case, 791; Pia, 776-7. Worldcat: BL and Trinity College, Oxford only.

Given away with the Illustrated London News on January 11th 1845. Apparently printed from 12 adjacent woodblocks. Examples were also issued folded, or mounted on linen, and not all were coloured. For an example not laid to linen, this one is in a good state of repair. The long Panoramic view is from an aerial elevation looking North across the river: Buckingham Palace and the Palace of Westminster (the latter before the addition of Big Ben, of course) stand a the western end, while Greenwich Hospital marks its easterly extent. Between those two points, the river curves eastwards, teeming with contemporary ships and rivercraft and the streets of the northern riverbank presented in admirable detail, together with all the major landmarks of the city, as denoted by the key. Included are: Nelson’s Column, erected three years before; the short-lived Hungerford Suspension Bridge (1845-1862, when it was removed and the chain used on the Clifton Suspension Bridge over the Avon) and the Marble Arch used as the gateway to Buckingham Palace (it was re-erected in Hyde Park only in 1851).

First edition. A very rare work, published for the author, La Serrie of the Vendée, who published a series of little books at the opening of the nineteenth century, in small editions for distribution among his friends, with illustrations engraved by himself. These are naive but accomplished and often very striking devotional compositions. They are almost all captioned, almost invariably with the letter ‘N’ in reverse. No copies located in Worldcat.

A unique artist’s book. Diane de Bournazel (b. 1956) creates books as ‘poems without words’ in her unique pen, ink and gouache style, filling each page with mazes of vegetation, mysterious borders, structures and figures, opening windows within pages allowing us to see behind and beyond them, suggesting a series of alternative worlds and narratives. Drawing on the universals of the cosmos, the natural world, of childhood and human relationships each of her books invite careful ‘reading’ and multiple interpretations. Collectors have found the books to speak for themselves, and the artist writes of her work simply as:

‘Poésie sans paroles.
Il s’agit bien de ça.
Mettre en images le monde et l’arrière monde,
Comme un poète mais sans mot dire’.

First edition, preserved in its contemporary wrapper. A panegyric given on the Feast of Saint Louis, patron saint of France in the church, to members of the Académies royales in the church of the Oratoire. Worldcat: Newberry and Michigan only outside France.

First edition. A homage to Rousseau in the form of a series of imaginary visits to his monument on the Isle des Peupliers in the gardens of Ermenonville which had been constructed by the philosopher’s patron, the Marquis de Girardin. Lepetit’s adverts on 6 pages at the end are of interest and include several translations from gothic novels in English (Anne Radcliffe, Eléonor de Rosalba, ou le Confessionnal des Pénitens Noirs; Miss Bennett, Rosa, ou la Fille Mendiante and Sophie Lee, Le Soutterrain, ou Matilde). Worldcat: Cambridge, Dumbarton Oaks, Illinois and Princeton only outside continental Europe.

First published in 1778, this important Lakeland guide had reached no less than 11 editions by 1821. Its picturesque vision was hugely influential and can be credited, at least in part, with establishing the Romantics’ interest in the Lakes. ‘Drawing freely on the work of previous writers, notably Thomas Gray, Thomas Pennant, and John Brown, and very much reflecting the contemporary interest in what West himself calls ‘landscape studies’, the Guide is nevertheless a work of considerable individuality, displaying a real sensitivity to the visual qualities of the district. The recommended 'stations' for viewing the landscape were a significant innovation. The author's antiquarian passion and his curiosity about industrial activities are clearly evident. The Guide undoubtedly did much to popularize the district (Oxford DNB).

The ‘Genii of Caricature’ haul in a net full of subjects (portraits, bon mots, manners, oddities, jokes etc) to Tegg’s Apollo Library, which advertises ‘The Largest Assortment of Caricatures in the World’, while the proprietor takes a pot shot at folly flying overhead. The caption is from Pope: ‘Eye Natures walks, shoot Folly as it flies, and catch the manners living as they rise’ (Essay on Man). The Apollo Library was at 111 Cheapside, at the corner of Honey Lane opposite St Mary-Le-Bow church. A famous caricature print, the tailpiece from The Caricature Magazine, vol. 3, published by Thomas Tegg, London, 1808–09, and the separate plate reissued several times to c. 1821.

A unusual collection of examples of typography and printing techniques, which would be of use in the classroom as non-digital but portable samples of letterpress and intaglio printing, woodcut, engraving, etching, lithography, wood engraving and their various combinations. All have been cut from (hopefully) defective original sources and include full pages (including numerous title-pages) and cut examples of initials (woodcut, metalcut, wood engraved, etc) and ornaments (intaglio and letterpress). Some of the sheets bear pencil notes as to approximate date and city, most being French, with some English and German. A good proportion of the samples are early, with a concentration in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but with significant sixteenth century examples, including decorative title-pages and initials.

First separate edition of Seguin’s tables of squares and cubes designed for architects and for other practical purposes. The tables were originally issued as an appendix to his Manuel d’architecture (1786) Worldcat: Cornell and Brigham Young only.

First edition of an influential pamphlet by a well-known French ceramicist, considering contemporary pottery from a hygenic point of view, and recommending his own newly-developed ‘hygiocerames’. Surveying the existing methods of production and glazing, he identifies numerous health risks in underfired pottery and in glazes using metal oxides. Wedgwood’s Etrurian pottery and his hugely-successful white Queen’s Ware come in for particular censure, though its popularity is conceded. The pamphlet was part of major enquiry into ceramic production in France initiated by the Sèvres factories.

First edition, an account of advanced English pottery techniques, mainly derived from those of Wedgwood. Instructions for decoration include both bas relief and transfer printing techniques, both relatively new methods in France. The plates depict English potter’s wheels and a kiln. Edme Jean Baptiste Bouillon-Lagrange contributed chemical data.

First edition, the first published work of Marga Gil Roësset (b. 1908) then aged twelve. Marga’s talent was astonishingly precocious, and her compositions for this fairy tale by her sister, Consuelo, combine vestiges of a distinctive Spanish art nouveau with a troubling, dreamlike quality entirely her own. Born into a cultivated and talented family, she became dangerously ill as a child, manifestly influencing some of these extraordinary illustrations. She published further illustrations before becoming a sculptor and exhibiting at the Esposizione Nazionale di Belle Arti a Madrid in 1932 as one of the most promising artists of her generation. She had, however, become infatuated with the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez (who was married) and committed suicide in 1932, having destroyed most of her work and presented her manuscript diary to Jiménez on the day of her death (it has recently been published). Worldcat: Princeton and Spanish Ministry of Education only.

Original engraved copper plate for a frontispiece to the Confessions, showing Rousseau himself as an allegory of the ‘natural man’ and the naked female figure of truth, engraved for volume 12 of the monumental 18 volume large quarto Didot edition of the collected works (1793-1800). An excellent example of an eighteenth-century large format copper plate. Cohen-de Ricci 912; Ray, 95.

A movie-enthusiast’s notebooks - filled with striking coloured portraits of male characters in films popular in the Netherlands, including Dutch-language versions of The Thirteenth Chair (1929 film); Madame Sans-gêne (1925 film); Maria Stuart (1927); The Trial of Mary Dugan (1931); Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, Shaw’s How He Lied to Her Husband; Jonson’s Volpone; Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, King Lear and Macbeth. The anonymous albums are numbered in pencil, suggesting they were part of a larger group.

First edition, inscribed: ‘À Miss Natalie Clifford Barney, imperturbable, André Rouveyre’. Rouveyre was a prolific newspaper caricaturist, moving in some of the most interesting circles of Paris society and developing his distinct and pioneering style, poised between minimalism and expressionism.

Henry Herbert, tenth earl of Pembroke and seventh earl of Montgomery (1734–1794) led a colourful life: after the Grand Tour he became a cavalry officer, married Lady Elizabeth Spencer and was appointed lord lieutenant of Wiltshire and a lord of the bedchamber to the prince of Wales He was forced to give up the latter when he eloped abroad with Elizabeth Catherine (Kitty) Hunter, by whom he fathered a son. Lady Elizabeth took her husband back in 1763, but he continued to have barely-concealed affairs: Walpole admitting he was ‘not surprised at any extravagance in his Lordship’s morals’.

‘Since youth Pembroke had been, in his own words, “horse mad”... and he had attended riding academies during his grand tour... In 1761 Pembroke published A Method of Breaking Horses, and Teaching Soldiers to Ride (2nd edn 1762; 3rd and 4th edns 1778 and 1793 entitled Military Equitation). This influential book provided sensible and much-needed advice. The author emphasized the need for officers to superintend the management of horses, advocated riding with a natural seat, and opposed the docking of horses’ tails’ (Oxford DNB).

The third edition was published at Salisbury, close by Pembroke’s family seat at Wilton, and this copy contains an inscription in French apparently recording its presentation: ‘De la part de Mylord Pembroke’.

Wisdom as a woman. The print is a good example of the relatively short-lived fashion for the ‘back painted’ or reverse glass coloured mezzotint. The print is moistened and laid face down on a varnished sheet of glass and allowed to dry; once the paper is firmly fused with the varnish and glass, most of it is scraped away from the verso leaving a minutely thin layer of printed paper within the varnish. This is then varnished again on the verso to give a rich and distinctive translucency. Colours, usually in oil, are then added, again to verso. Over time the varnishes invariably darken, resulting in the rather subdued but still translucent hues found here.

‘Wisdom’ was probably part of a sequence of the Vitrues published by Hinton, shortly after 1800. The British museum catalogue includes a further print representing ‘Innocence’ (but not reverse glass treated).

The life work of a Belgian natural history enthusiast, a massive and extraordinary collection of gathered knowledge, illustrated throughout with thousands of the author’s distinctive naive watercolours. The manuscript, in four volumes (one elephant folio, three folios), consists of complex visual arrangements of data which often extends over huge folded charts, each leaf filled to its maximum extent in neat manuscript in coloured inks. Though undated, it includes materials gathered in the period c. 1920-1943 and perhaps before, and in an inserted note, the otherwise unknown compiler describes the work of ‘most of my life’. It would appear to be the work of an amateur rather than an academic specialist, hence its striking originality as a work of popular science.

The large folio volume is really a huge collection of charts devoted to human anatomy, animal and plant biology, the fossil record and evolution (or transformisme). Botany makes up the largest proportion, but there are sections on insects, reptiles, birds, flying lizards, marsupials and mammals. Dumoulin also had an interest in Africa and there are sections on the Sahara and on the Belgian Congo. The focus is worldwide and is drawn from reference works rather than original research, but the arrangements are highly idiosyncratic. Several evolutionary charts are attempted, mentioning Linnaeus, Darwin, Lamarck and Jussieu.

The Dictionnaire botanique is a large 3 volume compilation mainly devoted to botanical classification, from the smallest mosses and seaweeds, to exotic flowering plants and forest trees. Like the larger folio volume, these volumes are illustrated throughout, with accompanying text in coloured inks and often containing emblematic figures of human figures appropriate to the origins of the plant: including Africans and Americans. They have apparently been bound from a large number of separate files (whose stiff paper cover with labels are preserved) each devoted to a different botanical family. The third volume contains additional materials at the end, including a study on Pasteur and germs, another on insects and another on bird classification. Like the preceding parts, these are also copiously illustrated in colour.

We have discovered almost nothing of Dumoulin himself, though various details place him in the French-speaking Walloon region of Belgium around Liège. He includes a couple of leaves devoted to Belgium, one with an interesting historical schema (including a memento of various gas attacks in the Great War). A couple of inserted letters are to Belgian academic scientists and one expresses Dumoulin’s hope that his work would end up at a University. The cover of largest volume bears various mottos, perhaps a personal credo: ‘La vie sans science est presque l’image de la morte, C. Volpi’, ‘Chercher. Comprendre. Vouloir. Pouvoir. Oser. Sentir. Méditer’, ‘Naître, mourir et renaître sans cesse, telle est la loi, telle est lavie. V. Hugo’ and ‘Travailler pour être estimé. Etre estimé pour être aimé. Etre aimé pour être heureux’. The wooden stand suggests an intention for display. Whether this was an elaborate teaching aid, or simply an almost-incredible recreation, is an open question.

An illustrated chansonnier, highly decorated, and including songs such as: Souvenir de ‘70, Les Femmes soldats, Le Baiser, l’Anglaise, Le Testament du Libre-Penseur, Marche du Bataillon d’Afrique, L’Africaine, Départ pour Madagascar, La Pucelle de Bellville, Les Prisonniers morts pour la liberté.

These notebooks are a fascinating example of a popular method of collecting popular French cabaret songs, all neatly copied up with headings and illustrations (usually suitably suggestive) copied from contemporary song sheets (an example of one of these loose sheets is loosely inserted). We have seen several similar examples, in which the illustrations are apparently traced using carbon paper from printed (or other manuscripts) exemplars. Their context is usually military or naval and they represent a significant form of popular or naive art.

The decorative title, with elaborate borders describes Arbez Carme as ‘employé au Magasin des Vivres de Réserve du 23me Reg[im]ent d’Inf[anter]ie a Bourg, Ain’. Military records record his birth in 1876 in Jura, his occupation as a perruquier (wigmaker) and his recruitment in 1896.