french

A correspondence course for amateur binders in 1960s France, aimed, according to the inserted advert at the retired, at professionals in search of a diverting hobby, office workers, young mothers and adolescents. The 21 parts of cours ‘A’ give detailed instructions in casing, and bindings of several types: bradel, cloth, half sheep (’basane’) and half cloth, with instructions for paper cleaning. Apparently a second ‘Cours B’ offered instruction in gilding.

A rare publisher’s advert for a short-lived satirical almanac devoted to the comic lowlife of the Parisian Latin Quarter, with its famously hedonistic students and lorettes courtesans or sex workers). The lorette emerged both in reality and in the popular imagination during the July Monarchy (1830-48), named after the Right Bank church of Notre Dame de Lorette where they were thought to reside and the almanac promises a range of playful gender inverting fun based on the ‘Vésuviennes’ (popular heroines of the 1848 revolution who donned uniform and took to the barricades) including the confessions of a Vésuvienne and their ‘Charte-Constitution’.
During the February Revolution of 1848, French women briefly hoped for political rights and an improvement in their social situation. Such hopes were short-lived and popular reaction was expressed in satires like this. The complex image of the Vésuvienne woman warrior, both pleasantly seductive and scandalously rebellious. She appeared in all the major newspapers, while real women in the streets claimed this title by parading under a Vesuvian banner. Their morality was often called into question and it is no surprise to see lorettes and Vésuviennes share a billing here. In Belhomme’s lithograph, three lorettes step out of basket (one thumbing her nose); a reflection of a popular contemporary song ‘Le Panier aux lorettes’.

A superb copy of first editions of both Mariette Lydis’s suites of illustrations for Les Fleurs du Mal. The 1928 set as copy B (one of 15 on vieux japon) of a total edition of 353 copies, with an original watercolour and 10 etched and coloured plates (in three states, including artist’s proofs often coloured in wash or crayon, signed/annotated in pencil) plus the 1935 set with 33 handcoloured lithographs issued in 11 cahiers. The 1935 plates and watercolour are bound with the text and the 1928 plates are bound after. The 1928 sequence, exhibited at the Salon d’Automne that year is probably one of Mariette Lydis’s best works, while the more extensive 1935 sequences illustrates her evolving style and was exhibited by Lydis in New York.
Govone issued his large-format Baudelaire in 1928, together with just 125 copies of the accompanying suite of etched plates by Lydis. It was the first joint production of this important partnership. Though both partners were resolutely bisexual, Lydis married Count Giuseppe Govone (her third husband) in 1934. The two remained married until his death in Milan in 1948 despite Mariette Lydis flight to Buenos Aires before the Second World War. In 1935 Lydis prepared a new suite of plates.
Both suites are bound here, preserving wrappers in a superb contemporary binding by one of the most celebrated binders of the Art Deco era, Louise Marot, who together with her daughter Suzanne Rodde created a series of bindings of exceptional refinement in the 1930s, before Louise’s untimely death in 1938 and the closure of the Marot-Rodde workshop. Their design for Les Fleurs du Mal is an exquisite and technically astonishing floral motif (evoking both the poppy and the rose) to both covers of this large volume. It is especially interesting as an early example of the ‘irradiante’ style, with sinuous lines creating the illusion of both movement and an undulating surface, usually associated with the binder Paul Bonet in subsequent decades. Bonet was experimenting with the earliest of these radiant designs at precisely the time Marot-Rodde created this one (ie. between 1935 and 1938). One has to wonder which way the influence flowed. Discussing the works of women binders in Paris in the 1920s and 30s, Duncan and De Barta comment: ‘Many of the works of these women have an exquisite delicacy and flow absent from the more formal compositions of their male counterparts. Examination of Marot-Rodde’s abstract floral designs, for example, reveals a preciosity and sensuality that male binders did not achieve.’ Duncan & De Barta, Art Nouveau and Art Deco Bookbinding (1989), pp. 20 and 194; Tidcombe, Women Bookbinders 1880-1920 (1996), p. 189.

The fashion for dressing prints existed probably from the origin of printed illustrations themselves, though it was a widespread, predominantly female recreation during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, often with a devotional intent.

The subjects here are Franciscan: Francis himself in a version of the legend of the appearance to him of the Virgin and Infant Christ, and Anthony of Padau in friar’s habit with an infant and a cherub. St Francis is the most elaborate of the two, with almost all of the cut print’s surface covered with colour, several silk brocade fabrics (brown, black, white and silver), gold paper highlights and glittering ground glass. Cherries on a tree above the group are rendered in tiny red wax spots, giving a round and shiny surface to each. The border is of black lacquer-like paint and gold paper, and an engraved Latin caption reads: ‘Quid parvum Francisce adeo miraris Iesu / Expecta pendens in cruce maior erit’. The surrounding parchment surface is illuminated with full borders of pink roses. Saint Anthony’s robe is rendered with a single piece of shiny brown silk, with narrow painted bands of the original print giving the impression of its folds. The grassy ground on which he kneels, and the tree above him shine with fragments of ground green glass.

First edition of the last book by a prolific French clairvoyant — in the form of a decree from the gods of Mount Olympus, this is a spirited plea in favour of the Duchesse de Berry then imprisoned for leading a rebellion against Charles X after the July Revolution. Like Le Normand’s other works it is couched in terms of dreams, predictions and angelic interventions. It bears her signature on the back of the half-title as a measure against piracy and the frontispiece shows her taking the Duchesse’s hand in prison, as an angel swoops down to crown her.

Marie-Anne Le Normand (1772–1843) was a celebrated (or notorious) clairvoyant, publisher, booskeller and self-publicist Famed throughout Europe for her exclusive clientele, she popularised cartomancy and spawned an enormous wave of imitators. At the height of her career she claimed to have advised the likes of Robespierre, Talleyrand, Metternich, the Empress Josephine and Emperor Alexander himself; others argued that the whole thing was a sham, and she was frequently arrested, spending several weeks in prison.

A complete set of the small plates for Le Brun’s influential artists’ manual, Conférence sur l’expression générale des passions (lectures at the French Académie royale given between 1668 and 1678, but not printed until 1698). They are preserved in their original uncut state, four plates to an uncut sheet. Each sheet retains the stab holes for stitching in oblong format, probably the form in which they were issued by Picart, with the plates reorientated here when bound on guards in the nineteenth century. They were evidently sold separately, uncut as here, but were also issued dissected with the small format editions of the Conférence.

Le Brun had lectured on the expression of emotions and produced a set of drawings to illustrate tranquility, admiration, desire, apprehension, joy, sadness, contempt and hatred, jealousy, and despair and fury. The lectures and the illustrations (’expressive heads’) were not published until 1698, when they appeared as Caractères des Passions which swiftly became one of the principal artists’ manual and was reprinted several times within a few decades, including in English. These Picart plates ‘correspond to [the first edition] with the addition of eleven new plates, except for fig. no. 34. Here, for the first time, the previously rather strange head-dress of this figure has been clearly represented as a metal helmet, thus making it easier to recognise in it Rhosaces, the man about to strike Alexander in the Battle of the Granicus’ (Montagu).

This set bears the stamp and spine title of the Pictura Groningen (the stamp being Lugt 2028); a print collection now widely dispersed. Jennifer Montagu, The Expression of the Passions. The Origin and Influence of Chalres Le Brun’s Conférence sur lexpression générale et particulière (Yale, 1994) B.8.

First edition. Fragoletta, in which a woman disguises herself as a man and seduces another woman, was a major point of reference for early nineteenth-century literature, notably inspiring Balzac’s Séraphîta and Théophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin with its fascination with the androgynous or doubly-sexed body. It clearly took inspiration from Bernini’s statue of the sleeping hermaphrodite and is one of the first nineteenth century novels to feature a hermaphrodite protagonist. It’s most obvious echo in English literature is in Swinburne, whose 1866 Poems and Ballads contained the poem ‘Fragoletta’ — an ode to androgyny in which the boy/girl (’a double-rose’) is rendered more desirable by their double sexuality.

A rare Norman Office of the Saints dedicated to saints and other feasts added to those of the traditional Roman breviary by papal decree. It gives prayers and readings for each, including those for Saints Canute (January 19), Patrick (March 17), Anselm of Canterbury (April 21), Monica (May 4), Margaret of Scotland (July 8), Cajetan (August 7), Wenceslas (28 September), Laurence Justinian (September 5), Notre Dame de Mercede (September 24) and Francis Xavier (December 3). The printer, Rémy Le Boullenger (1637?-1707) is not among the three Lisieux printers listed in the Répertoire d’imprimeurs/libraires and appears in just a handful of imprints in the CCFr (among which ours does not appear).

The binding is made from a reused leaf from a medieval antiphonal, probably French, of the fourteenth- or early fifteenth century, which bears fragments of chants on four-line staves ruled in red. On the outer cover is a portion of a text from Acts 12: 11 (‘Petrus ad se reversus dixit nunc scio vere quia misit Dominus angelum suum et eripuit me de manu Herodis et de omni expectatione plebis Iudaeorum’) and on the inner appears a fragment of Matthew 16: 17-18 (‘Et ego dico tibi quia tu es Petrus et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam et portae inferi non praevalebunt adversum eam’; And I say unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it). In comparable antiphoners, both appear among antiphons sung on the feast of Saint Peter and Paul (29 June).

First published in Latin in 1520, this is considered the first ethnographic compendium of the Early Modern period in Europe, a collection of the manners and customs of all mankind, as it was then known to most Europeans. It considers Africa, Asia and Europe. It first appeared in French in 1540. Its first appearance in English was as William Waterman’s The Fardle of Facions in 1555 and it was printed in forty-seven editions between 1535 and 1620. British Library and Bibliothèque nationale only in WorldCat. Atkinson, La Littérature géographique fraņçaise de la Renaissance: répertoire bibliographique (Paris, 1927), n° 73.

A diminutive French prayerbook for personal Catholic devotions with an interesting English provenance, inscribed by one Mary Radclyffe. Given that this is a Catholic prayer book there is a strong possibility that it was bought, owned and inscribed by Lady Mary Radclyffe (1732–1798) of an English Catholic family with longstanding links to the exiled Stuarts. Mary’s father, Charles, a Jacobite and freemason, was an illegitimate grandson of Charless II (by Moll Davis) and spent most of his life in exile in Europe. He took part in the Jacobite Riding of 1745 and was executed the following year. Mary Frances Guillelma Radclyffe was born at Rome in 1732 and married Francis Eyre of Warkworth Castle in February 1755. Their eldest daughter, Maria Eyre, was born later that year.

Copy number 5 of 111 copies only printed for Les Cent Une, Société de femmes bibliophiles, with two original pencil drawings and a suite of proof plates. All copies were printed on paper watermarked ‘Les Cent Une’ and this is a tirage de tête copy printed for member, Celeste Pigasse. The text is after the 1556 French edition by André Jaulme (complete with authentic contractions) while the superb visual interpretations by Mariette Lydis include two of her characteristic decorated maps (both are signed). This is one of the early publications for the women’s book collecting club founded in Paris by the Princesse Schakhowskoy in 1926 as a direct riposte to ‘Les Cent’ — a bibliophile circle which then included no women among its members. Les Cent Une issued editions limited to the 101 members only and a handful of collaborators, usually no more than once a year, and the club is still in existence. Celeste Pigasse (née Crouzat) was a founder member and served as the club’s general secretary in its formative years (her husband founded the publishing house Librairie des Champs-Élysées ‘LCE’ whose Le Masque imprint published popular crime and detective fiction, including the French editions of Agatha Christie). Carteret IV, 322.

Smith’s Wealth of Nations had first appeared in French in 1778-9 in an anonymous translation, followed a second by Jean-Louis Blavet in 1781. Roucher’s translation first appeared in four volumes in 1790-1. Jean-Antoine Roucher (1745–94) was a poet from Montpellier, friend and admirer of J.-J. Rousseau. He welcomed the Revolution, but was arrested in the Terror and went to the guillotine. Rochedieu 304; Goldsmiths 14106; Kress B, 1986. K. E. Carpenter, The Dissemination of The Wealth of Nations in French and in France, New York, 2002, pp. 85-87.

A popular Épinal print by the first established in 1860 as Pinot & Sagaire, later (1872) just ‘Pinot’. Founded by François Charles Pinot (1817-1874), who had joined the Pellerin firm in 1847 and left in 1860 to found the rival firm, the Imagerie Pinot & Sagaire, or Nouvelle Imagerie d’Epinal.

Sole edition of this entertaining almanac for 1789, aimed at young people (but presumably not children) with a delightful suite of humorous and mildly erotic plates by François-Marie-Isidore Quéverdo. Each month is given an engraving, several verses and songs with music. Among the latter is found ‘Air de la negresse’ — a three-verse song with music from (or perhaps just inspired by) Radet’s 1787 opéra-comique La Negresse. Though recorded by both Gay and Carteret we have not located any institutional copy in the usual online catalogues (WorldCat, KVK, CCFr, JISC). Carteret 866; Gay I, 112.

First edition to contain the engraved frontispiece and title. Marked ‘troisième édition’ on the title-page, this edition, is actually the fourth — following the edition printed privately (in just 25-40 copies) in 1823 and the first two trade editions of 1824. The illustrated edition is considerably rarer (at least in commerce) than the preceding two trade editions (and the true first virtually unobtainable). The plate shows Ourika at the moment of realisation of her isolation and her fate in white European society. Ourika, based on fact, and influenced by Rousseau and Chateaubriand, is the complex story of a black African child, bought (some said rescued) from the slave trade and raised in aristocratic circles in Revolutionary France. It is the first fully developed attempt to portray a black heroine in Europe and the first French novel with a black female narrator. It proved controversial from the start and remains so. On the one hand it has been interpreted as a compassionate account of both racial and female alienation (Duras certainly projects her own experience onto that of her heroine) while on the other it has been described as a sustained act of appropriation and even as an apology for slavery. Whatever is the case, it caused a sensation with the first trade edition of 1824 becoming a bestseller and later editions very widely read in France and further afield (with early translations into English, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish and Danish).

First editions of two rare satires purporting to offer spectacles for the short-sighted. Other than that the two works couldn’t be more different, both in tone or content.

The most significant is the Lunette pour une vuë courte apparently almost unrepresented in European or American library collections. Pseudonymous (’by a northern optician’) and with a false St Petersburg imprint it is a virulent rebuttal of the natural philosophy of Jean-Baptiste Robinet, encyclopédiste and proto-evolutionist. The work under the satirist’s lenses is Robinet’s Vue philosophique de la gradation naturelle des formes de l’étre (Amsterdam, 1768) in which the author had expounded part of his theory of the advance of nature via an active principle common to all forms, from stones to complex plants and animals. Like several other Enlightenment precursors Robinet contributed to the history of evolutionary thought later crystallised by Darwin. He envisaged links between all natural forms, only temporarily invisible, all subject to an active process of refinement and development. Our Lunetier-satirist was having none of it and dismissed the work as a tissue of bizarre dreams and a monstrous production that could only be dismissed by humour. In particular he singles our for ridicule Robinet’s discussions of shells which seem imitate female genitalia (Concha veneris) and fossil stones (priapolites) resembling the male.

The other work is a cautionary and resolutely anti-feminst verse romp through the perils facing the modernday Everyman (’Quidam’) in Paris where the vices of women lurk at every corner to ensnare him. No copy of Lunette pour une vuë courte, ou Bagatelle historico-physico-morale llocated in Worldcat. Lunettes a éclaircir la vue: Gay II, 921.

First edition of a gothic drama recounting the trials of an incarcerated nun — a theme with obvious anticlerical and libertarian potential which attracted several French novelists of the Revolutionary era, including Olympe de Gouges (in Le Couvent ou les voeux forcés) and Chénier (in Fénelon ou les religieuses de Cambrai). Julie was Pougens’ only drama and was evidently given salon performances by the actor François-Joseph Talma, and William Godwin read it in 1801 (Diary, 4 July 1801 http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/diary/). Charles de Pougens (1755–1833) is an interesting figure — the natural son of the Prince de Conti, he was highly educated and began a diplomatic career in Rome 1776, cut short by smallpox which left him blind. He travelled to England and was associated with Cagliostro and the transgender Chevalier D’Eon. Sentenced to death by the French Revolutionary authorities, in 1794, he survived when the execution of Robespierre brought an end to the Reign of Terror. The National Convention awarded him a pension, and in 1795 he opened a business in Paris selling books on commission. He best known for his early speculative lost-race novel Jocko (1824). Gay, II, 749; Cioranescu 51120; Quérard VII, 302. Worldcat: Hagley Library, Harvard, Texas, Toronto and Victoria (BC) in North America.

First edition, first issue with all the first issue points called for by Dufour: the erroneous spelling of the author as ‘Jaques’, the accent to ‘conformé’ added in manuscript the publisher on p. 11, the three cancels (pp. LXVII-LXVIII, 111-112, and 139-140) and the final leaf with instructions to the binder for placing the cancels.

The Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men, also commonly known as the ‘Second Discourse’ examined social inequality and its origins and was Rousseau’s entry in a competition by the Academy of Dijon. Rousseau sets out to demonstrate how the growth of civilization corrupts man’s natural happiness and freedom by creating artificial inequalities of wealth, power and social privilege. Contending that primitive man was equal to his fellows, Rousseau believed that as societies become more sophisticated, the strongest and most intelligent members of the community gain an unnatural advantage over their weaker brethren, and that constitutions set up to rectify these imbalances through peace and justice in fact do nothing but perpetuate them. Rousseau’s political and social arguments in the Discourse were a hugely influential denunciation of the social conditions of his time and one of the most revolutionary documents of the eighteenth-century.

The inscription ‘F.H. Bothe’ is possibly that of Friedrich Heinrich Bothe (1771-1855), German poet, translator and classical philologist. Tchemerzine, X, 32; Dufour-Plan 55-56.

Nuit pleine, while characteristic of De Bournazel’s astonishing unique books, also signals new directions. A profound black occupies many of the spaces between the teeming figures inhabiting each page, and on close examination they emerge from this darkness through negative spaces. The pages mirror several of her recent panel paintings where figures are revealed from blackness in the same way. Nuit pleine seems to explore a more contemporary scene than many of her books and among the the hybrid figures we surely find protesters among the crowds with placards, flags and even a cellphone. Angular structures in the puzzle-like backgrounds suggest an urban rather than rural scene, and yet timeless figures of mermaids, jesters and death itself anchor the book in a cyclical timeless continuum.

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’.

De Bournazel has recently been the subject of an essay by French medievalist and cultural historian, Michel Pastoureau, entitled ‘Fenêtres sur le rêve’ (2024) written to introduce the artist’s first major Paris exhibition. Following a deep consideration of the artist’s visual world he concludes: ‘The reading of Diane de Bournazel’s work takes a deliberately plural path, as in a fairy tale or a dream. It is obviously this way that she wants to lead us. And herein lies the magic of her art, an art that is both bewitching and bewitched, absolutely original, impossible to photograph and still less describe or explain. Her creations appeal not only to our imagination but to all our senses at once. You have to look at them, listen to them, feel them, breathe them and, ultimately, savour them’.

Fatrasie is a twenty-first century visual interpretation of a rare and highly distinctive medieval poetic form of satirical nonsense verse. In the Fatrasie form, early French rhymers subjugated meaning to the rhythm of repeated sounds and syllables and yet were able to hide piquant criticisms of prevailing power structures within their verses. It is a particularly apt title among Diane de Bournazel’s unique artist’s books, which frequently conceal their narratives and meanings within the artist’s dense iconography.

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’.

De Bournazel has recently been the subject of an essay by French medievalist and cultural historian, Michel Pastoureau, entitled ‘Fenêtres sur le rêve’ (2024) written to introduce the artist’s first major Paris exhibition. Following a deep consideration of the artist’s visual world he concludes: ‘The reading of Diane de Bournazel’s work takes a deliberately plural path, as in a fairy tale or a dream. It is obviously this way that she wants to lead us. And herein lies the magic of her art, an art that is both bewitching and bewitched, absolutely original, impossible to photograph and still less describe or explain. Her creations appeal not only to our imagination but to all our senses at once. You have to look at them, listen to them, feel them, breathe them and, ultimately, savour them’.