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First edition. A major catalogue of over 700 Empire-style neoclassical plaster ornaments for exteriors and interiors, plus some schemes for entire rooms. Beunat learned the art of plaster moulding in England before patenting his method in France and establishing his factory at Sarrebourg (Moselle) in 1805.

Lettice Hallett (1787–1859) was the eldest daughter of the Radical reformer William Hallett of Denford Park, near Kintbury, in Berkshire. She married solicitor Nash Crosier Hilliard (1789–1844), of Grey’s Inn, in 1819. The three-page section of writing here, dated 20 November 1825, records ‘A list of the several person of the respective Families of Nash Crosier Hilliard and of Lettice Elizabeth Hilliard living at this Period’: Hilliards, Halletts, Nelsons, and Fowles. The first section, for which the book has been turned on its side, in oblong format, contains poetry: a 24-line poem ‘On Science’ (‘E’er yet the Morn of Science rose on Earth …’) by ‘W. D.’; ‘Lines found deeply engraved on the Bark of a large Tree in the Neighbourhood of Mentz [i.e. Mainz] in Germany’; ‘Music’ by William Strode (1598–1645; ‘When whispering strains do softly steal …’); ‘To a Friend in Distress’ (‘Shrink not to meet with adverse fate or part, / When black the scene, then bravely arm your heart …’); ‘The Morning before the Ball’, ‘The Morning after the Ball’, and extracts from ‘The Traveller’ and ‘The Deserted Village’ by Goldsmith.

The other end of the book (for which the book has been flipped over to write) is taken up by a history of England, seemingly paraphrased, and expanded, by Lettice from Trusler’s Compendium of Useful Knowledge (1784 and later editions), from the Ancient Britons up to William the Conqueror and his sons.

A miniature lotto set, rare complete with all the printed cards and counters.

An atmospheric series of watercoloured prints of the German-controlled Dutch-Belgian border in 1915 by a Belgian artist in exile in Holland. Issued in very small numbers (perhaps no more than 20 copies), it is marked ‘Série 1’, but no more were produced. Some of the images show the high-voltage electric fence erected by the Germans in 1915 to put an end to clandestine cross-border traffic between Holland and Belgium. On Belgian territory, the fence ran from the German border, from just behind Vaals (Limbourg) all the way to the Belgian coast. The Elektrische Grenzabsperrungszaun claimed many lives though smugglers soon refined their methods and the border was never completely sealed.
Willems had studied in England (notably the watercolours of Turner) but was at home with his family in Belgium when war broke out, fleeing to Holland in 1914, where these remarkable and evocative prints were produced and published the following year.

A nice pairing of physiologies, of the courtesan and the married man, illustrative of ‘the craze that swept Paris in the early 1840s for a series of small illustrated volumes marketed under the general title of physiologies [looking back, perhaps, to Brillat-Savarin’s bestselling Physiologie du goût (1826) and Balzac’s Physiologie du marriage (1830)]. Some 120 different physiologies were issued by various Parisian publishers between 1840 and 1842 (ranging alphabetically from the Physiologie de l’amant to the Physiologie du voyageur), and it is estimated that approximately half a million copies of these pocket-sized books were printed during the same two-year span’ (Sieburth, p. 163).

Designed for mass consumption, these satirical guides to particular social types were based on ‘the witty interaction of image and text, drawing and caption, seeing and reading … Byproducts of the recent technological advances in printing and paper manufacturing which had made illustrated books more commercially feasible and analogous to the various dioramas and panoramas which enjoyed a considerable popularity during the period, these illustrated anthologies of urban sites and mores catered to the public’s desire to see its social space as a stage or gallery whose intelligibility was guaranteed both by its visibility as image and its legibility as text …

‘Quickly produced and marketed, consumed and discarded, … the physiologies (like the sensational tabloids or canards hawked on Paris streetcorners of the period) are early instances of the cheap, throwaway “instant book” whose appeal lies in its very topicality and ephemerality’ (op. cit., pp. 165–7). Richard Sieburth, ‘Same difference: the French Physiologies, 1840–1842’, Notebooks in Cultural Analysis (Duke UP, 1984), pp. 163–200.

In 1827 Harriet Mellon, widow of the banker Thomas Coutts married William Beauclerk, 9th Duke of St Albans. The daughter of a family of travelling players, Harriet had become an actress at an early age and was spotted by Coutts while performing in London. As a young woman she was widely celebrated for her beauty, and was painted by George Romney and Sir Thomas Lawrence. She became wealthy (as a senior partner of Coutts bank) and was 23 years older than Beauclerk on their marriage, providing ample scope for unkind commentary and ammunition for the satirists. Nicknamed ‘The Jolly Duchess’ Harriett enjoyed her wealth, was a great collector and generous patron. She wrote to her friend Sir Walter Scott:

‘What a strange eventful life has mine been, from a poor little player child, with just food and clothes to cover me, dependent on a very precarious profession, without talent or a friend in the world – first the wife of the best, the most perfect being that ever breathed …and now the wife of a Duke! You must write my life… my true history written by the author of Waverley’. (Scott’s Journal, 30 June 1827).

After her death, she left an allowance to the Duke but her fortune passed to step-grandaughter Angela Burdett-Coutts, whose philanthropic association with Dickens is well known. BM Satires 15461. 

First edition, rare, of this collection of racy tales from the Palais Royal, the fabled European capital of libertinism. Framed as a series of initiatory narratives on the perils of loose women and gambling, Les Soirées actually contains several anecdotes of sociological interest. One involves a bragging libertine husband, who claims his wife would never cuckold him, only for the narrator to seduce her and to contrive a fitting punishment for his boasts. He arranges adjoining private rooms in a favourite Palais Royale restaurant, sending the husband to one with a complicit mistress, while he himself takes the libertine’s wife to another. As the couples make love, an opening between the two rooms allows them to see just enough of their neighbours to further inflame their desire. Only on leaving the chamber does the husband realise that it was his wife he has seen in flagrante in the other room, and with his friend. After an understandable outburst, a philosophical discussion ensues on the equivalence of female and male desire and morality (see Counter, The Amorous Restoration: Love, Sex, and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century France, 2016, p. 137).

The two plates were evidently printed on the same sheet, appearing as a folding frontispiece in some copies.

Anonymous, it is attributed to Cuisin, who specialised in Palais Royale titillation and produced many similar works. The printer, the widow Jeunehomme is an interesting figure, one of a handful of female printers in Paris at this point and a Bonapartist who was later imprisoned for political reasons (Dictionnaire des femmes libraires en France, 1470-1870). Worldcat locates copies at Bn (without half-title), BL (with half-title) and Johns Hopkins (also 1815, but ‘Second edition’, perhaps an error, confounding this work with an earlier work with a similar title)

Second edition (appearing in the same year as the first) of one of the best-loved works of William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania. After Penn’s departure from Pennsylvania in 1684, he returned to England. At the time of the Glorious Revolution, and James II’s exile he faced charges of high treason and was forced to remain in seclusion for three years. During that time he wrote Some Fruits of Solitude, a collection of maxims on such subjects as marriage, family, friendship, religion, and the temptations of wealth. Licensed on May 24 1693, the aphorisms were published anonymously (to avoid the author’s reimprisonment for disloyalty) and epitomize the simple Quaker truths upon which the Republic would be based, distilling the essence of Penn’s spiritual idealism, combining it with practicality and common sense. Wing P1369; Smith, Descriptive Catalogue of Friends’ Books, II, p. 309.

First edition of a pioneering work in the field of forensic medicine, the graphic images depict numerous conditions resulting from homicidal and suicidal injuries. The grisly and powerful photographs show skull and bone fractures, the impact of gunshot wounds, burns, injuries caused by stabbings, the effects of hanging and so on. Each set of 50 plates is accompanied by a booklet providing details of each image and the important features from the legal-medico cases from which the photographs have been obtained. Heidtmann, Bibliographie der Photographie: Deutschsprachige Publikationen, 14062. OCLC locates 4 US copies and no UK copies.

A rare imprint of a popular satire on the Reform movement, in the form of a mock marriage service. The sheet is known with a J.V. Quick, Spitalfields imprint, but LibraryHub records no copy of this Birt imprint.

First edition with the illustrations by Vigoureux. Number 2 of 15 copies with the suite of all 20 wood engravings on chine, all initially by the artist. Fayard’s Livres de demain brought examples of the current revival in woodcut and wood engraving to a wide audience at a reasonable price. Accordingly, the illustrations of the regular volumes were printed in large numbers from phototype metal blocks made from the prints, with just 15 copies of each (as here) presented with an additional suite of the original woodcuts specially printed on fine paper.

First edition with the illustrations by Berthe Marx. Number 2 of 15 copies with the suite of all 29 wood engravings on chine, all initially by the artist. Fayard’s Livres de demain brought examples of the current revival in woodcut and wood engraving to a wide audience at a reasonable price. Accordingly, the illustrations of the regular volumes were printed in large numbers from phototype metal blocks made from the prints, with just 15 copies of each (as here) presented with an additional suite of the original woodcuts specially printed on fine paper.

First edition with the Roubille illustrations. Number 2 of 15 copies with the suite of all 29 wood engravings on chine, all initially by the artist. Fayard’s Livres de demain brought examples of the current revival in woodcut and wood engraving to a wide audience at a reasonable price. Accordingly, the illustrations of the regular volumes were printed in large numbers from phototype metal blocks made from the prints, with just 15 copies of each (as here) presented with an additional suite of the original woodcuts specially printed on fine paper.

First edition with the Colin illustrations of Audoux successful autobiography of a humble rural upbringing (1911).

Number 2 of 15 copies with the suite of all 21 wood engravings on chine, all initially by the artist. Fayard’s Livres de demain brought examples of the current revival in woodcut and wood engraving to a wide audience at a reasonable price. Accordingly, the illustrations of the regular volumes were printed in large numbers from phototype metal blocks made from the prints, with just 15 copies of each (as here) presented with an additional suite of the original woodcuts specially printed on fine paper.

First edition with the illustrations by Roubille, one of 15 copies with all the wood engravings present in a signed suite on chine.

Fayard’s Livres de Demain brought examples of the current revival in woodcut and wood engraving to a wide audience at a reasonable price. Accordingly, the illustrations of the regular volumes were printed in large numbers from phototype metal blocks made from the prints, with just 15 copies of each (as here) presented with an additional suite of the original woodcuts specially printed on fine paper. The series was very popular and ran for several years, with some titles reprinted in successive editions.

First edition of the first of Fayard’s important Livre de Demain series, one of 15 copies with the illustrations in an additional suite on chine, signed. Benjamin’s Prix Goncourt novel of 1915 was written in hospital while recovering from injuries sustained at Verdun in September 1914 (and first published by Fayard). The wood engravings are among Renefer’s most evocative war illustrations.

Fayard’s Livres de Demain brought examples of the current revival in woodcut and wood engraving to a wide audience at a reasonable price. Accordingly, the illustrations of the regular volumes were printed in large numbers from phototype metal blocks made from the prints, with just 15 copies of each (as here) presented with an additional suite of the original woodcuts specially printed on fine paper. The series was very popular and ran for several years, with some titles reprinted in successive editions.

First edition with the illustrations by Hallo, number 2 of 15 copies with the suite of all 23 wood engravings on chine, all initialled by the artist. Fayard’s Livres de demain brought examples of the current revival in woodcut and wood engraving to a wide audience at a reasonable price. Accordingly, the illustrations of the regular volumes were printed in large numbers from phototype metal blocks made from the prints, with just 15 copies of each (as here) presented with an additional suite of the original woodcuts specially printed on fine paper.

First edition with the Falké illustrations, number 2 of 15 copies only with the woodcuts on chine, numbered and initialled by the artist. A colonialist novel in which a young Senegalese fisherman finds himself enlisted in the army, fighting with the French in the trenches of the Great War. It first appeared in 1922. Fayard’s Livres de demain brought examples of the current revival in woodcut and wood engraving to a wide audience at a reasonable price. Accordingly, the illustrations of the regular volumes were printed in large numbers from phototype metal blocks made from the prints, with just 15 copies of each (as here) presented with an additional suite of the original woodcuts specially printed on fine paper.

A series of witty and finely executed erotic miniatures, presumably a Paris souvenir made with an anglophone audience in mind, most likely the American servicemen in Paris after 1945.

First edition in English. This copy in an attractive Regency binding with an interesting English Catholic provenance: the Hornyold family of Worcestershire. The Blackmore Park estate had been in the hands of the Hornyold family since the sixteenth century, and in 1844 Thomas Charles Hornyold donated land for the building of a new Catholic church. The church, with an attached monastery for monks of the Redemptorist order, was paid for by John Vincent Gandolfi, a Genoese silk merchant who had married into the Hornyold family and would inherit the Blackmore Estate in 1859. ESTC: BL, London Oratory, Bodley (several copies), Newberry Library and Clark Library (UCLA).