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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).

One of Heath’s famous graphic satires on the theme of The March of Intellect, which expressed contemporary anxiety over technological progress and social change in England brought about by science, education, industrialisation and commercialisation. This one shows a London street corner at the edge of open country and the sea, with numerous figures, including a street-sweeper, horse-drawn carriage, two men playing chess, musicians and singers and street-sellers, with wealthy figures being sent down a mechanical lift beside giant shop window stuffed with milliner. A steam carriage full of redcoat soldiers is seen in background, along with passenger balloons and a flying warship (raining canon-fire at ships below) in the air beside bridge crossing the English Channel between Dover and Calais.

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 of this extensive pocket guide to London, England and Wales for a juvenile audience. The description of London is admirably complete, with notes on the principal monuments as well as its people and customs (‘The Lord of Merry Disports’ and ‘Itinerant Musicians’ among them). The plates (originally appearing London, or interesting Memorials published by Thomas Boys in London in 1823) depict The Custom House, Somerset House, Hanover Terrace and Westminster Abbey. Adams, London illustrated, 1604-1851 (1983), 150. No US copies in Worldcat and JISC/COPAC records the Bishopsgate Institute and Bodley copies only.

The earliest portrait of Leopold Bloom? Mariette Lydis contributed one illustration to the first issue of “900”, placed with the fragment of Ulysses in the French translation by Auguste Morel. The image is clearly identifiable as a Leopold Bloom-like figure, yet is perhaps not a direct illustration (what are we to make of the Ostende tourist poster in the background?). It is dated 1925 in the lower corner and is captioned ‘Illustration’ at the foot. No earlier illustration of Bloom is known (nor indeed any earlier illustration of Ulysses) and the standard idea of him is drawn partly from Joyce’s own inept sketch of him made in Paris in 1926.

Joyce was nominally a joint editor of the radical literary review “900”, with Massimo Bontempelli. Mariette Lydis was Bontempelli’s lover at this period (her letters to him are preserved at the Getty Institute) and probably also know Joyce. She sketched his portrait the following year in Paris.

The Ulysses excerpt translated by Morel is episode 4, ‘Calypso’, introducing Leopold Bloom with his morning visit to the butcher’s shop for a kidney for Molly’s breakfast. James Joyce is listed among the journal’s editors on the half-title verso (along with Bontempelli, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Jerog Kaiser and Pierre Mac Orlan). Among the adverts at the end of the volume is a full-page for the forthcoming German edition of Ulysses by Rheinverlag of Zurich (the book appeared in the autumn of 1927). Another advert is for the journal Critica Fascista (a ’Fornightly Fascist Review’). Slocum & Cahoon, A Bibliography of James Joyce (953), D25 (p. 113).

Cf. King 733 (Albert Warren, probably the same binding, but edition of Menzies, Edinburgh, 1858). Victorian Decorated Trade Bindings (British Library & Oak Knoll, 2003).

Not in King, Victorian Decorated Trade Bindings (British Library & Oak Knoll, 2003).

Not in King, Victorian Decorated Trade Bindings (British Library & Oak Knoll, 2003).

King 202 (Albert Warren). Victorian Decorated Trade Bindings (British Library & Oak Knoll, 2003).

Not in King, Victorian Decorated Trade Bindings (British Library & Oak Knoll, 2003).

King 174 (John Leighton). Victorian Decorated Trade Bindings (British Library & Oak Knoll, 2003).

Not in King, Victorian Decorated Trade Bindings (British Library & Oak Knoll, 2003).

Not in King, Victorian Decorated Trade Bindings (British Library & Oak Knoll, 2003).

Not in King, Victorian Decorated Trade Bindings (British Library & Oak Knoll, 2003).

Not in King, Victorian Decorated Trade Bindings (British Library & Oak Knoll, 2003).

Not in King, Victorian Decorated Trade Bindings (British Library & Oak Knoll, 2003).