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First edition in French of Middleton’s A Dissertation Concerning the Origin of Printing in England (1734–5), which argued vigorously that Caxton had introduced the printing press to England, against the popular notion at the time that William Caxton had been preceded by a printer at Oxford. Added is a short introduction (in French) concerning Middleton. The ‘Londres’ imprint is false, and the book was almost certainly printed in Paris. The typographical headpiece is a delight. Rochedieu, 213.

A rare Brussels piracy of a popular gothic and melodramatic novel, printed entirely on bright green paper. The book had first appeared in Paris the same year and seems to have been swiftly pirated by more than one Belgian printer. WorldCat locates no other copy with this Wahlens imprint, and thus probably no other copy on this striking paper. While green paper used in wrappers and bindings is widely recorded in this period (as well as the more common emerald green cloth used in ‘poison’ bindings) the use of a complete stock of green paper for the text block is rare. It remains to be determined whether such stocks are arsenical or coloured with heavy metal derivatives. Now wash your hands.

Thadéus le Ressuscité was a collaborative novel between Masson and Luchet, telling the story of a man condemned to death during the Terror who survived to encounter his accusers and betrayers in the post-Revolutionary period. It combines gothic melodrama with historical morality and allegory.

Huysmans died on 12 May, 1907 after a long illness. He had dictated the text of his funeral invitation In his last days, having reportedly seen the handsome black-edged funeral notice of an acquaintance. Calling himself homme de lettres, adding his presidency of the Académie des Goncourt and membership of Légion d’Honneur, he simply states that he died ‘muni des Sacrements de l’Eglise’ (fortified by the sacraments of the church). It begins with the address ‘M[onsieur]’ for the addition of a recipient’s name, but it is blank here. The souvenir card is similarly black-edged and contains short excerpts from five of Huysmans’ works: En Route, La Cathèdrale, Sainte Lydwine, L’Oblat and Les Foules de Lourdes. The funeral took place at the church of Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and Huysmans was buried in the cemetery of Montparnasse — clothed, according to his last wishes, in the garb of a Benedictine monk. Banks, The Image of Huysmans, p. 205,

An attractive pocket edition of Ségur’s study of the historical condition of women in ancient and modern society (first published in 1802) with a fourth volume containing Ida Saint-Elme’s continuation (first added to Les Femmes in the edition of 1822 with the title De la Condition des femmes sous l’Empire et sous la Restauration). It contains chapters on the Empress Josephine, Princess Charlotte of Wales, Madames de la Lafayette, de Sévigné, du Chatelet, de Graffigny, Riccoboni, de Genli, and de Duras. This complete edition of 1828 is rare.

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.

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’).

First edition. An extensive survey of the Welsh musical tradition by a celebrated Welsh harpist and antiquary in London. ‘Edward Jones moved to London in 1774 or early 1775, under the patronage of the London Welsh circle. The harp was very fashionable in London at the time, and Jones quickly established himself in some of the most eminent circles as a popular performer and teacher of the instrument’ (ODNB). He became harpist to the prince of Wales (later George IV). Musical and poetical Relicks, a rather costly production with an extensive subscriber’s list, contains a major essay on bardic poetry with texts and songs in both Welsh and English. An engraved plate shows the principal instruments of Welsh music, including the harp and lyre, while the second part of the book mainly comprises engraved music for some 60 Welsh tunes, some Jones’s variations, all on two staves and thus suitable also the keyboard.

‘Jones’s most important work was in the preservation of traditional Welsh music. He collected and published over 200 traditional melodies, many of which he transcribed from having heard them sung and played at home in north Wales. His concern for the protection of Welsh cultural life is also evident in his strong belief in the eisteddfod as a safeguard of Welsh cultural traditions and the purity of the Welsh language. He invariably attended eisteddfodau on his regular summer visits to Wales, often acting as an adjudicator; and on several occasions he provided and presented prizes for competitions such as singing with the harp and the best collection of penillion’.

This copy is from the library of the Dukes of Portland, containing the bookplate of William Arthur, sixth duke of Portland (1857-1943), but with an earlier gilt supralibros denoting the presence of the book in the Portland collection at an earlier date. It is quite likely to have formed part of the celebrated subterranean library collections at Welbeck Abbey of the eccentric John Bentinck fifth duke of Portland.

First edition, first issue, printed for private circulation in an edition variously estimated at between 25 and 40 copies — one of the great rarities of nineteenth-century European literature.
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).
This true first edition, which contains no date of publication, precedes Ladvocat’s 1824 first trade edition by at least three months, and was in circulation in December of 1823, on the evidence of several excited notices in the contemporary press (Pailhès). It is known in two issues, this copy being of the first, with the title page bearing only the title and a quote from Byron: ‘This to be alone, this, this is solitude!’. A second issue followed swiftly with the Byron quotation moved to the head of the text on p. 3 and 16 minor textual corrections; issue points which were recognised and enumerated by Louis Scheler in his article ‘Un best-seller sous Louis XVIII: Ourika par Mme de Duras’, Bulletin du bibliophile, 1988, 11-28. In both issues no author’s name is given and the place of publication and the printer (the Imprimèrie Royale) appear only as a colophon on p. 108. Scheler also cites Mme de Duras’s letter of 14 January, 1824, in which she notes that the first edition was of no more than 30 copies, though it is unclear whether this relates to the first issue only or the first and second.
Worldcat locates only the Bibiothèque nationale, Harvard, Morgan Library and Princeton copies of the first edition. Harvard actually holds copies of each of the two distinct 1823 issues. The Morgan Library copy is in red morocco with the arms of George IV of England, while the Princeton copy retains its original printed green wrappers. Carteret, Trésor du Bibliophile romantique et moderne 1801-1875 (1976) ‘de la plus grande rareté’, mentioning a single sale record for this edition: 24 May 1966 (morocco by Simier, 1700 francs); Pailhès, La Duchesse de Duras et Chateaubriand, p. 314-17.

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 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 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’.

One of 10 copies on chine signed by the artist (copy number 3). This is an exceptional copy of the most prized work by this important member of the Belgian avant-garde (1879-1957), published while he was a refugee in London during the Great War. For the tale of Little Red Riding Hood, the artist confines himself a small palette of the simplest colours in keeping with the symbolism of the text: red, yellow, pale tan, blue and green, each in single bold tones, only overlaid to form other tints in a few instances, notably for the fox with overlaid tan and yellow marking him out. The binding is completed with appropriate red cord stitching.

Tijtgat, apprenticed in his father’s lithographic studio, had long been an expert printmaker, but was without a press in London and developed his immediately recognisable style by printing from both woodcuts and linocuts using a simple handroller (his woodcut colophon here shows him at work, pulling a print on a simple table top). The prints of Le Petit Chaperon rouge, painstakingly produced under difficult circumstances, exemplify an invention born of necessity, aptly combined with the apparent naivety of Tijtgat’s art and his artistic interest in the pleasures and fears of childhood. Cyril Beaumont’s support for this refugee artist exemplifies the wider British patronage of exile artists among the tens of thousands of Belgians who fled to Britain between 1914 and 1918, who made a significant impact on British modernism. Besides Le Petit Chaperon rouge, Beaumont published the illustrated poetry collection New Paths with contributions by Tijtgat (1918) as well as the artist’s Carrousels et baraques in 1919. After the war Tijtgat remained for some time in London, before returning to Belgium in the twenties. He is rightly considered an important member of the group later called the Brabant Fauvist’, which had included Tijtgat’s great friend and collaborator, Rik Wouters, who died in 1916 following his internment by the Germans.

The limitation states this is one of 50 copies only: number 3 of 10 copies on chine, signed (there were also 40 unsigned copies). This is Tijtgat’s definitive edition (after the very few copies of a large paper trial edition of 1917 and before the Brussels reprint of 1921). The present copy, complete with the original decorative wrapers and endpapers is just as the book appears in Tijtgat’s painting of 1922, Ma Chambre-atelier, where a copy is lying on a table, together with the artist’s pipe, a bowl of fruit and a vase of flowers (Milo, Tijtgat, 1930, plate 3). Pascal Taillaert, Edgard Tytgat (1999), 38 (noting variations between copies and unbound copies, as well as the 10 additional copies on chine, not listed in the limitation, made for the Ministère des Sciences et des Arts de Belgique). Ridley, Beaumont 10.

First edition, one of 180 numbered copies on papier vélin (total edition 250 copies). A collection of sixteen illustrated proverbs and popular superstitions (broken mirrors, the number thirteen, touching wood and so on). Somewhat in the vein of the artist’s earlier dreambook (Orientalishches Traumbuch) it contains the ironic dedication: ‘Ce livre est dédié à la femme tout spécialement, cet être frêle et sans défense, faible et indécis, qui a tellement besoin d’un appui occulte pour la guider’. The pochoir colouring is by Saude and the typography by Maurice Darantière (of Joyce’s Ulysses fame).