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First edition of this commentary on the customary law of Lorraine, by Pierre Canon ‘juge adsesseur au bailliage de Vosges’. With the rise of feudalism in medieval France, the country evolved into two distinct judicial territories. The provincial parliaments in northern and nestern France, such as that of Lorraine, acted as sovereign judicial bodies independent of each other and claimed independence from the king, applying droit coutumier, or legal principles derived from local customs and privileges. The customs of Lorraine were ‘codified in 1594 under the auspices of Charles III, duke of Lorraine. The coutume of Lorraine included three general coutumes, those of the bailliages of Nancy, Vosges, and Allemagne’ (cf. The Coutumes of France in the Library of Congress, Caswell & Sipkov. 1977, p. 55).

The annotations in this copy appear to be in a single early hand, giving running headlines to most right-hand pages, plus further headings in the left and right margins, together with numerous calligraphic asterisks, some in leadpoint, some in ink. There also three records of proceeding relating to customary law at the rear, incuding one (dated 1667) concerning taxation wrongly exacted by the Abbess and Convent of Bouxidre (unidentified) on local inhabitants. A slightly later hand has added a very neat table of contents (perhaps at the time of binding). Gouron & Terrin. Coutumes, 1111; LC Coutumes, 451. Rare: George Washington University and Library of Congress only outside continental Europe.

First edition in French of Aphorismes Civill and Militarie (London, 1613) comprising 246 political and military aphorisms selected from the Italian historian Guicciardini, designed to teach the lessons of history in a pithy and pragmatic form, in the spirit of Montaigne. The original had been dedicated by the English courtier Robert Dallington to Henry, Prince of Wales and later also to Prince Charles. Mouchemberg’s free translation, retaining the structure of the original, with glosses and apparatus, was dedicated to Antoine Coiffier-Ruzé, Marquis d’Effiat, who had negotiated the marriage of the Prince of Wales (later Charles I) with Louis XIII’s sister, Henrietta Maria of France in 1625. Mouchemberg later published a continuation of another British work — Argenis by John Barclay.

Dallington (1561-1636) is an interesting figure in European literary culture. Initially educated at Cambridge (Corpus Christi College) but without taking a degree, he published translations from the Hypnerotomachia as The Strife of Love in 1592, dedicated to the memory of Sir Philip Sidney and to the Earl of Essex (into whose circle he was drawn). He made at least two grand tours, one in a party with Inigo Jones. His View of France was first published in 1604 and his Survey of … Tuscany in 1605, both written for private circulation. Rare: Worldcat lists the British Library as the only location outside continental Europe, with no North American copies.

First editions of two significant anticlerical polemics. Factum pour les religieuses de Sainte-Catherine-lès-Provins is a celebrated example of the power of popular print over conventional legal process. In the 1660s a faction of nuns at Saint-Catherine sought to overthrow the tyranny of their abbess who was in league with the local Franciscans. Unable to access regular legal channels (as women and nuns) they appealed directly to the local parlement with this devastating Factum detailing a host of abuses committed by the Franciscans in their convent. The Factum was ‘purportedly addressed to their judges but intended for broad public distribution. In it they charged that the Franciscans ran Sainte-Catherine as a personal brothel, seducing and sometimes physically forcing the nuns into sexual relationships with friars while simultaneously plundering the convent’s treasury. The titillating Factum pour les religieuses de Sainte-Catherine-lès-Provins contre les pères cordeliers told a story that borrowed narrative inspiration from contemporary novels and pornography. It quickly became a sensation. The Franciscan order denounced the work as an illegal defamatory libel, and most copies of the original appear to have been seized and burned. But the Factum was quickly bootlegged, became a hot commodity in the clandestine book trade and earned, from the evidence of its multiple editions, a very broad readership (Tuttle). Indeed, several early editions survive, almost all issued without genuine imprints, and the first edition is extremely rare. Among the nuns’ many complaints is the accusation that friars brought pornographic books into the convent including Maximes d'amour, L’Ecole des filles and Catechisme d’amour and that one of them supplied a novice with a cipher to ‘write filth’ (pour écrire des ordures).

Elixir Jesuiticum also issued without a formal imprint was directed against the Jesuits and contains an interesting dedication to English Archbishop William Laud. Factum: cf. Gay II, 225 and see Tuttle, ‘From Cloister to Court: Nuns and the Gendered Culture of Disputing in Early Modern France.’ Journal of Women's History (2010) 22, 2, pp. 11-33; Elixir Jesuiticum: VD17 12:115207Y

First edition of this children’s allegory of female education by one of the most prominent early British suffragists. Marion Wallace-Dunlop was involved in the suffrage movement from 1900 (the year after this book appeared) and was thrice imprisoned at Holloway: first, in 1908 for obstruction and second, in 1909 for stencilling an extract from the Bill of Rights onto the wall of St. Stephen’s Hall, Westminster. During her second incarceration she was the first suffragist to go on a hunger strike. In November 1911 she helped to organise a window-smashing campaign and was imprisoned once more and in 1928 she was a pallbearer at Emmeline Pankhurst’s funeral.

The Magic Fruit Garden is a ‘fairy tale about a girl struggling to write an essay on ‘Perseverance’. In her quest for wisdom, Doc finds a magic fruit garden where knowledge-fruit grows on bushes and trees. Here she picks ‘geography-plums and history-apples and grammar-pears and all the time her knowledge of everything kept growing bigger and bigger’. In a glass conservatory, Doc encounters piles of sweets ‘made from mixtures of the various fruits in the garden boiled in a syrup called Research. There was botany-sugar, zoology-candy, geology-toffee, and sugar-plums of every kind and colour’. When she gets home, her brother tells Doc it was only a dream and remarks that it’s ‘just like a girl to think that a dream is real. However, he then embarks on an adventure of his own which forces him to admit the magic garden is real (from the website of the University College London Exhibition, Disrupters and Innovators, 2018). Dunlop’s printed dedication reads simply: ‘To my Mother’.

‘Marion Wallace-Dunlop studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1903 (when she also exhibited a painting at the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts), and in 1905 and 1906. Her paintings were also exhibited in Paris. She illustrated in art nouveau style two books, Fairies, Elves, and Flower Babies and The Magic Fruit Garden, both published in 1899’ (Oxford DNB). The Magic Fruit Garden was issued by Anglo-German publisher Ernest Nister, best known for his colourful moveable and popup books. Very scarce in both commerce and libraries. In the US, Worldcat lists copies at: Purdue, Princeton, Dartmouth and Universities of Rochester and Connecticut only.

A good and typical illustrated commonplace album with transcribed verses, drawings and watercolours. The selections are very much representative of the contemporary fashion among women for such manuscript collections: poems by Byron, Goldsmith and others, verses of friendship, loss and leave-taking, nature poems, riddles and aphorisms. A nicely self-aware inclusion here is Benjamin Franklin’s humorous ‘Paper a Poem’ relating paper types (gilt paper, copy paper, brown paper, foolscap, touch paper, waste paper and so on) to human analogues. The relatively few poems by women include Ann Radcliffe’s ‘To the Nightingale’ and ‘To Anne’ (unattributed here but by Mary Anne Browne, 1812-1845, entitled by her ‘Written in an Album’). Most of the contents have been entered within a few years of 1828 followed by a scatter of much later entries of the 1870s and 80s towards the end.

The best description of the album genre in the history of reading and writing is by William St Clair in The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (2004, pp. 224-9), a passage could aptly serve as a description of Ann Jordan’s album.

A substantial unpublished manuscript practical treatise on obstetrics and midwifery. 39 headings (most with numerous subheadings) plus several further sections towards the end where spaces have been left for formal headings not completed (for the full list of contents see below). An entirely practical treatise, probably intended as a course of instruction for midwives, it opens with a statement of ‘Les qualités d’une Sage femme’ covering both the physical and temperamental requirements of the calling (’Qualités physiques’ and ‘Qualités morales’). Throughout this carefully prepared and presented text are found numerous references to authors of the published corpus of European works in obstetrics including the works of: [Marie-Louise] Lachapelle [1769-1821]; [Jean-Louis] Baudelocque [1746-1810]; [Franz] Naegele [1778-1851]; Madame Meyer [?] and [Antoine Louis] Dugès [1797-1838] among several others. It thus presents an interesting case study in the dissemination and reception of medical knowledge in a practical context beyond the context of formal printed texts.

Les qualités d’une Sage femme
Accouchement
Bassin en Général
Excavation
Detroit Infèrieur
Articulations du Bassin
La tête du foetus à terme
Appareil de Copulation
Vagin
Appareil de Germination
Apareil de Gestation
Changements que l’Utérus eprouve pendant les divers Mois de la Grossesse
Déplacements de l’utérus
Renversement de l’utérus
Divisions de l’Abdomen
Developpement des annexes du foetus
Membranes propres à l’Oeuf
Placenta
Le Cordon ombilical
Developpement du foetus
Fonction du foetus
Circulation foetale
Changements que la circulation eprouve pendant les divers Mois de la grossesse
Changements que la circulation foetale eprouve pendant le travail de l’Accouchement
Changements que la circulation foetale eprouve après la Naissance
De la Grossesse (with a series of direct and indirect diagnoses)
Grossesse Géméllaire
Grossesse-extra-uterine
Accouchement
Sécrétion du lait
Présentations du Foetus
Positions de la Présentation du Vertex
Présentation de la Face
Présentation du Pelvis
Description du Forceps
Avortement
Hémorrage Produite par Implantation Anomale du Placenta
Invertie Utérine
Eclampsie ou Convulsion

Joseph Rounard is listed at the address in Marseille’s Place d’Orléans from the later 1840s.

First edition of this children’s primer for the alphabet and elementary reading. The alphabets are given in varying types to aid recognition, and then a graduated scheme of reading provides short texts in syllabic form in large type, moving to standard orthography in regular type. The texts include stories and fables by Fénelon, La Fontaine, Benjamin Franklin (’Le Sifflet’ a translation of ‘The Whistle’), Nodier, and Balzac (an early collaborator of Hetzel, who contributed his story ‘Tony Sans-Soin’). The charming vignettes (some later coloured, presumably by a careful child) are by Séguin, Meissonnier, Grandville and others.

Le Livre des Petits Enfants,was one of the very earliest publications by juvenile publishing pioneer Pierre-Jules Hetzel and though not marked as such in this first edition, was to form the first volume of his Nouveau Magasin de Enfants series (which ran to 17 more titles by 1857). It was reprinted several times, but the first edition is rare. Vicaire pp. 227-8. Penelope E. Brown, A Critical History of French Children's Literature, 2011, p. 19. Worldcat lists copies at Columbia and NYPL only outside continental Europe. COPAC/JISC adds a copy at Aberystwyth.

A lovely copy with contemporary ownership inscriptions: ‘Mlle. Justine Debonnaire’. Bouilly’s popular conduct book in the form collection of short stories ran to at least three French editions within a year, and another was published in London in 1813. The 19 stories (completed with a conclusion) include ‘Les Oiseaux de madame Helvétieus’; ‘La Robe feuille-morte de madame Cottin’, ‘Les Tablettes de Florian’, ‘Les Manie des Romans’ (especially interesting and amusing, with a tilt at Ann Radcliffe and the gothic vogue), ‘Jenny la Bouquetière’ and ‘Les Dangers d’un Bon Mot’.

‘Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit / Death how certain Death how sur[e] / Sin the wound. And Christ the cure’. ‘Emma. Preest. Her work / Tuts Hill House / July. 20. 1847 Aged /12. Years. Old’.

Emma Preest is possibly the Emma born on the 8th June 1835 at Bream Eaves, Gloucestershire and baptised in the Wesleyan chapel at Monmouth — certainly that would accord with her given age (12) in 1847 when she made this sampler. The identity of Tuts Hill house is not straightforward, there having been two houses so named in the vicinity of Tidenham, Chepstow. We can find no pictorial evidence of either of them as a three-storey, four bay house as in Emma’s depiction, and no Preest family associated with either. But if one accepts the likelihood of Emma being Gloucestershire born, both houses would have been some ten miles from her birthplace, suggesting the possibility she entered service at one of them at the age of 12 (quite possible) and that this may have been an ‘apprentice’ piece. Young girls were taught this kind of sewing not so much as a primer in reading (still less writing) as in household needleork and linen labelling.

The verse is a variation of a popular gravestone epitaph: ‘Life is uncertain, death is sure, Sin the wound, and Christ the cure. If we have correctly identified Emma Preest, she married in 1854, had several children and emigrated with her family after 1870 and died in 1915 at Shawnee, Perry County, Ohio, USA, aged 80.

First edition in French of any part of Eden’s The State of the Poor. Or, an History of the Labouring Classes in England (1797) one of the classic works in the history of economics and the foundation of the discipline of sociology. This extensive but partial translation formed numbers 21 and 24 of the rare Recueil de Mémoires sur les étabissemens d’humanité, continuously paginated across the two volumes. The editors’ preface notes the timeliness of such a translation at a time of revolutionary upheaval when no system of social security for the poor existed in France. Issued anonymously the translation is attributed to A.-C. Duquesnoy by Rochedieu. It precedes the edition translated by La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt of 1800 and is very rare. Rochedieu, Bibliography of Translations of English Works 1700-1800, 95. Cf. Printing and the Mind of Man, 249 (the English edition). Besides the British library copy (incomplete, apparently the first volume only), Worldcat locates no other copies outside continental Europe.

Alphabet (upper and lower case), several decorative lines and two verses: ‘Is there ambition in my heart / search gracious God and see...’ [Isaac Watts] and ‘Teach me to live / that I may dread/ the grave as little / as my bed // Teach me to die ‘ that so I may / with joy behold /the judgement day’ [Thomas Ken, and later sued by Thomas Hardy in Jude the Obscure]. Needlework samplers remain one of the most widespread manifestations of the teaching and learning of basic literacy among girls and young women and, as here, reflect a strongly moralistic background.

Greenaway’s ‘Procession’ greetings card set consisted of just two cards, but with each produced with variant verses.

This set includes all four variants of each.

Card 1 (Blue border):
(a) ‘A garland fair for Christmas day...’
(b) ‘My Valentine in every rose discern...’
(c) ‘Well we love our roses sweet...’
(d) ‘Thro the Year that dawns...’

Card 2 (Pink border):
(a) ‘A garland fair for Christmas day...’
(b) ‘Let’s love and live together, dear...’
(c) ‘Well we love our roses sweet...’
(d) ‘Thro the Year that dawns...’ Schuster & Engen, Kate Greenaway, 284.

The three greetings cards comprising the larger version of Greenaway’s Party Girl set, each present here in several variants, listed below according to Schuster & Engen 282.

Card 1 Girl with Badminton set
a) recto ‘Christmas’ verso ‘I wish you all the joy that you can wish’.
b) recto ‘Christmas’ verso ‘May the day be as happy as you could wish’.
c) recto ‘New Year’ verso ‘Thy own wish, wish I thee in every place!’.
d) recto ‘Valentine’ verso ‘To bear my love to you to-day’.
e) recto ‘Greeting’ verso ‘Thy own wish, wish I thee in every place’.

Card 2 Girl in rust coat and beaver hat
b) recto ‘Christmas’ verso ‘Wishing you every happiness and blessing’.
d) recto ‘New Year’ verso ‘May the day be as happy as you could wish’.
d variant) recto ‘New Year’ verso ‘Wishing you every happiness and blessing’.
e) recto ‘Valentine’ verso ‘From one who loves you dearly’.
g) recto ‘Greeting’ verso ‘Thy own wish, wish I thee in every place’.
h) recto ‘Greeting’ verso ‘May the day be as happy as you could wish’.

Card 3 Girl in green dress
a) recto ‘Christmas’ verso ‘Thy own wish, wish I thee in every place’.
b) recto ‘Christmas’ verso ‘Wishing you every happiness and blessing’.
c variant) recto ‘New Year’ verso ‘I wish you all the joy that you can wish’.
d) recto ‘Valentine’ verso ‘I bring you some flowers from your Valentine’.
e) recto ‘Greeting’ verso ‘Wishing you every happiness and blessing’.
f) recto ‘Greeting’ verso ‘May the day be as happy as you could wish’. Schuster & Engen, Kate Greenaway, 282.

First edition, apparently transcribed from a genuine Middle English original. The title-page notes: ‘The Manuscript to be disposed of. – Apply to the Printer’. pp. 61-70 is an ‘Astronomical and Astrological Appendix’ from a work published in 1647. Caleb Stower (d. 1816) was an interesting and prolific printer with Unitarian connections.

A wonderful satire on contemporary women’s fashion. The 1820s had seen considerable change in women’s fashions, with neoclassical straight lines and sparse adornments giving way to a more exhuberant and romantic style with more emphasis on curvaceous shapes, cheekily satirised here with wine glass and fruit. BM Satires 15611.

53 invitation cards to the notorious Parisian annual costume ball. The ball was inaugurated in 1892, and apart from the war years, ran until 1966, with attendance restricted to students and alumni of the École, both men and women, as well as a few ‘artistic personalities’ who had contributed to the preparation of the ball. They were held in several major venues scattered throughout Paris over the years, with most taking place at the Moulin Rouge, the Salle Wagram, and the Parc des Expositions at the Porte de Versailles. Although in its early years the ball was simply an elaborate party, from 1900 each ball had a specific theme, often derived from an ancient text or historic period or inspired by an ‘exotic’ foreign culture, around which various contests were arranged. With the addition of a theme the balls became more elaborate often turning into debaucherous affairs with guests soon discarding the period costumes that they were required to wear to gain entrance. The nudity, dancing and merrymaking often continued into the following day, the ball usually ending, with a shout of ‘Vive les Quat’z’ Arts!’, around seven o’clock in the morning, followed by a procession through the Latin Quarter, the Louvre, and a march over the Pont du Carrousel to the Théâtre de l’Odéon, where the partygoers would disband.

Not surprisingly The Bal des Quat’z’Arts quickly became one of the premier events of the summer season. The invitations were elaborately designed to match the spectacle of the events, and correspondingly were often thematically orientalist, exotic, or primitive, with overtly erotic and sexual imagery. They are a tour de force of the evolution of artistic style, showing the progress from Art Nouveau to modernist primitivism, up through psychedelic design — though in retrospect they exhibit a troubling degree of predatory sexism and cultural appropriation. The ball is famously depicted in a series of photographs by Brassaï of 1930 and numerous other photographic records exist of the ball, allowing a comparison of the themes of the printed invitations and the costumes worn on the night.

There were different invitations for men, women and committee members, and most included a tear-off coupon, which often survivie. This group contains examples from the following years, all complete with their coupons except where specified: 1895 (by Caran d’Ache); 1901 (without coupon) 1902 (without coupon); 1904 (m, without coupon); 1906 (?f); 1908 (f without coupon); 1909 (f); 1912 (f); 1913 (f, without coupon); 1914 (poster, folded once); 1920 (f); 1922 (m); 1923 (f); 1924 (f); 1927 (f, without coupon); 1928 (f); 1928 (m, without coupon); 1929 (m); 1929 (comité, without coupon); 1929 (f); 1930 (comité, without coupon); 1931 (m without coupon); 1931 (f without coupon); 1932 (m, without coupon); 1933 (m, without coupon); 1934 (m); 1939 (f?); 1946 (m); 1947 (m 2); 1948 (m) 1948 (f, without coupon); 1949 (m) 1949 (f); 1950 (m) 1950 (f); 1951 (m) 1951 (f) 1951 (additional); 1952 (m) 1952 (f ) 1952 (additional); 1953 (m) 1953 (f); 1954 (m?); 1955 (m) 1955 (f); 1956 (m) 1956 (f); 1958 (m) 1958 (?); 1959 (m); 1964 (m); 1966 (m?), plus one unidentified year.

A nice collection of eleven physiologies, one of the many such little books 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).

A nice collection of eight physiologies, one of the many such little books 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.

A satire on contemporary fashion, one of the many such little books 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.

A satire on educated women, one of the many such little books 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.