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A very rare publisher’s advert for children’s books, issued on behalf of Amable Rigaud (a pseudonym of children’s author and publisher Charles de Ribelle), publisher at 50 rue Sainte Anne, Paris. Rigaud was prolific from around 1859 to 1880 and this fine lithograph appears to date from the early part of this period. It lists 15 different title all published around 1859-61 including Histoire des siècles. Des Découvertes et inventions, Livre des jeunes personnes vertueuses, Le grand Alphabet pittoresque de la jeunesse, Le Monde et se merveilles and Histoire des animaux célèbres. Born in 1810 Ribelle had also founded a juvenile magazine Journal des enfants.

First edition, known otherwise only from the Bibliothèque nationale copy, of this tiny promotional pamphlet for the notorious (yet successful) marriage agent in imperial Paris. It is a remarkable little testimony to post-revolutionary upheaval and its effects on social relations. Marriage-broker Villiaume is credited as the pioneer in France of advertising for partners in the petites affiches of newspapers. He had apparently hit upon the idea while imprisoned in the mental asylum for his part in an assassination attempt against Napoleon: he is reported to have made enquiries into the social situation of all the male inmates (which naturally at this date included numerous members of the old aristocracy) and then did the same among their female counterparts in the women’s asylum. On his release he founded the Agence Générale et Centrale pour Pais et l’Empire on the Rue Neuve-Saint-Eustache and began a Parisian craze for marriage brokering.

Evidently prepared to turn his hand to any promising enterprise this pocket guide advertises his services as a broker not just for marriages, but of various other situations and he takes the opportunity to defend himself against his many detractors and to advertise the sale of his neighbours’ second-hand furniture.

‘Founder of the most widely known matrimonial agency in postrevolutionary France, Claude Villiaume proved his talents as an enterprising ad man who exploited the uniquely commercial format of the Parisian Petites affiches to establish a virtual monopoly on the business under the Empire. Offering to serve as a conduit for men and women who pursued love anonymously in the Petites affiches, he skillfully marketed his “marriages by the classifieds” to lonely, uprooted individuals throughout imperial France. Villiaume pitched his unions as part of a new commercial and social world of movement in Paris. He sought to facilitate the circulation of capital and people by forging family alliances and love matches across multiple social and geographic borders. By linking marital choice and courtship to the vagaries of consumer capitalism, the agent transformed marriage into a form of commercial exchange associated with the new urban values of abundance, pleasure, and social mobility’ (abstract from Andrea Mansker, ‘Marriages by the Petites Affiches: Advertising Love, Marital Choice, and Commercial Matchmaking in Napoléon's Paris’, French Historical Studies (2018) 41 (1): 1-31).

Sole edition, one of 50 copies on chine. An illustrated collection of epithets on love and the relationships between men and women, a witty reflection of the sexual politics of fin-de-siècle Paris. The conceit of the title, and the charming accompanying vignette, involves communication (or perhaps miscommunication) via headphones and a phonographic machine operated by Cupid. It is a nice example of the contemporary fascination with the potential of electronic communications, with echoes of the science-fiction fantasy La Fin des livres by Albert Robida published in the same year, in which a new world of literature was a network of wires and headphones and of the Theatrophone apparatus recently exhibited at the Paris exhibitions. Worldcat lists 3 copies only: Bibliothèque nationale, British Library and Yale.

A calligraphic certificate by Julia Beck, being the copy of a letter of 8 June 1914 sent by a leader of the women’s movement in France, Isabelle Bogelot to Canadian feminist, Lady Aberdeen endorsing the new book by Indiana feminist, May Wright-Sewell, entitled Genesis of the International Council of Women (1914). It was written on behalf of the Conseil National des femmes françaises.

Calligrapher Julia Beck was born in Stockholm in 1853 and moved to Paris in 1883. She became one of the first female artists from her country to make a living through art alone. She is best-known for her landscape paintings in the Impressionist style, which were highly regarded in France and abroad, but she supported herself partly through commercial calligraphy, at which she excelled. She was a committed advocate for women artists.

Sole edition: tales and snippets based on the argot, gossip and jokes of the Porcherons quartier of Paris, at the foot of the slope to Montmartre. It includes the woeful tale of a young clerk and a prostitute and a Catéchisme poissard. It purports to be the work of a washerwoman, ‘Mame Fanchon’. The term ‘Poissarde’ (literally, a fishwife) refers, in general, to coarse and vulgar language and is frequently to be found in chapbooks of the period. Worlcat: Flanders Heritage Library (Antwerp) only.

First edition, a satirical play on the Convulsionnaires (’les quakres françois’) and the Jansensists who were seen to have encouraged them with their belief in miracles. The tomb of the Jansenist M. de Pâris in the Paris churchyard of Saint Médard had become the location for an outbreak of popular devotion and miracleworking, with miraculous cures and speaking in tongues regularly reported. It became a cause célèbre, and the authorities were forced to close the churchyard. The episode spawned a large literature: favourable, unfavourable and satirical. Bougeant’s play is firmly in the last category and comes complete with a satirical woodcut of a contortionary dancer as ‘Instructeur des acteurs du Tombeau de M. de Paris’. ‘The most famous of the Convulsionnaires was Father Bescherand, known for his ‘sautes-de-carpe’, wild carp-like leaps performed in spite of a famously bad limp. In Les Quakres françois ... Bougeant satirizes Father Bescherand as a complex plot unfolds to grace this virtuosic Convulsionary with a troupe of men and women paid to jump and leap with him... (Gotman, Choreomania: Dance and Disorder, 2018, p. 102). Cioranescu 13200.

A Napeoleonic-era manuscript course in classical and modern French history made for a woman or girl, Caroline Hémart. Probably prepared by a tutor, the texts are enthusiastically neo-classical in tone: the opening ‘Élements de chronologie’ serve as a grounding in ancient history (with definitions of terms such as ‘Olympiade’) of Europe and the near East, based on the text of Napoleonic scholar, Luc de Lancival. The manuscript concludes with 27 stanzas of a heroic poem, ‘Ode à Clio’ by M. Le Comte François de Neufchateau (published c. 1807), which is, again, a glorious version of history seen through still-rosy Napoleonic lenses.

A superb collection of over 300 spontaneous sketches made in situ in Paris of popular films and entertainments of the 1950s, including the classics Les Vacances de M. Hulot, Buñuel’s El, Le Ballon Rouge and other French films by Renoir and Meliès, Sophia Loren in Neapolitan Carousel, Bob Hope and Lucille Ball in Fancy Pants, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin in Artists and Models and Marilyn Monroe in Bus Stop.

Ryutchi Souzouki (1904-1985) had been a well-regarded and well-connected Montparnasse figure, counting Ernst and Foujita among his friends in the twenties and thirties and frequently exhibiting alongside the surrealists. Born in Yokohama, he spent much of his life in Paris, though his Japanese citizenship prevented him from exhibiting during the war years and probably accounted for his increasing isolation in the post war period. A solitary figure, until his death in poverty, he continued to work, experimenting with automatic drawing and making sketches, such as these, from popular films and entertainments, such as the tableaux vivants of the Casino de Paris, the Folies bergères, conjuring performances and the opera, instantaneously capturing their spirit on scraps of hotel stationery, recycled scraps or cheap spiral-bound notebooks. They are witty, touching and always engaging responses to what he saw in the cinemas and theatres of Paris. Following his death, the contents of his studio, including the many albums he had carefully collated in his final years (like ours) were conserved by his concièrge and dispersed at auction in 1985.

1949-53, 1953-6, 1953-4, 1956-7, 1962

First edition. A delightful collection by a prolific gastronomic author, devoted to the matter of women at table, a counterpoise to the masculinity of French gastronomy: ‘Une table sans femmes est une table sans fleurs’. This is one of 20 copies on Van Gelder, after 10 on japon (total edition 400).

A rare satirical elegy and epitaph for the celebrated electrical eel, who could no longer rise to the occasion. A reissue of the sheets of the first edition of 1777 with a cancel title, of this elaborate addition to the corpus of salacious 1770s pamphlets devoted to the subject of the electrical eel, a topic of serious scientific enquiry and popular merriment. This one continues the phallic joke and manages to draw in the hapless Chevalier D’Eon (whose sex was then popularly debated) alongside the lecherous Earl of Harrington.

‘If the Gymnotus Electricus, lately exhibited to the Public, be really dead, it is to be hoped that we shall have no more of these witty indecencies’ (Monthly Review, Nov. 1777). ESTC: Harvard and Princeton only worldwide of this issue. ESTC gives the pagination [4], 29, [1], but both the 2 copies reported have only pp [2] before title, as here, though it is perhaps likely the work was issued with a half-title or initial blank not present in surviving copies.

A notorious pamphlet by the famous transvestite spy, issued during one of the most colourful and tangled episodes of Anglo-French diplomacy. This ‘seconde’ edition issued at the expense of the corps des Militaire François in D’Eon’s defence. The first edition (also 1767) bore a Londres imprint and survives in only a handful of copies; our Amsterdam edition is even rarer with no copies located in Worldcat.

Following a successful military career d’Eon served Louis XV in English diplomacy and espionage from 1762, gathering defence intelligence for a projected French invasion. Living lavishly in London he became something of an embarrassment to his government who stopped his pension and sought to recall him to France. He became embroiled in a bitter row with his compatriot Claude Louis François Régnier de Guerchy (1715–1767), who he saw as an interloper on his diplomatic patch. ‘From October 1763 the dispute took a spectacular turn as d’Eon published allegations that Guerchy had tried to poison him. In March 1764, he went further still and published a selection of his diplomatic papers, which heaped ridicule on Guerchy and his allies in France’ (Burrows, A King’s Ransom). The dispute was a profound embarrassment to the French, not least because d’Eon successfully brought the matter to the English courts and because it drew attention to the chevalier’s increasingly complex personal life. It was in the wake of this affair that the chevalier went into hiding in Byfleet (Surrey), spending a years disguised as a woman and going by the name of Madame Duval. This transvestite experiment became a pattern and the remainder of his career was lived partly as a woman and he became a celebrated figure in London society.

This pamphlet, a superb piece of propaganda issued on d’Eon’s behalf appeared after the comte de Guerchy’s death in 1767 and reproduces the last letter sent to him by d’Eon recounting the facts of the poisoning case together with extensive translations from English legal records of the law case as it worked its way, very publicly, through the courts.

A very appealing romantic era book of drawing designs for children, with animals, flowers, occupations and costumes. Not located in Worldcat.

An interesting manuscript prospectus of a large and still-unpublished account of the French revolution. François-Jean Baudouin had been a printer and bookseller to the Assemblée nationale in the revolutionary period, later becoming a journalist and publisher. He evidently wrote a long first hand account of the politics surrounding the Revolution, which remained unpublished. It was apparently in the hands of one Tacheron, a doctor to the XI Légion at the opening of the nineteenth century, who wrote this manuscript prospectus of it, transcribing part of the introduction and giving a detailed précis or analyse of its 16 chapters. He notes that it would run to some eight or ten octavo volumes, probably suggesting he was intending to publish it. In the event it seems never to have been published and since the whereabouts of the manuscript is now unknown, this 43-page summary is witness to a major work of Revolutionary history.

‘François-Jean Baudouin, imprimeur-libraire, né à Paris en 1759, mort en 1838. Elu député suppléant du tiers aux Etats Généraux, il dut à cette circonstance d’être nommé imprimeur de l’Assemblée Nationale, privilège qu'il conserva jusqu’en 1809. Il fut aussi propriétaire du Logographe, journal dont il envoyait tous les jours le premier exemplaire à Louis XVI... Il publia en 1810, un Projet de règlement pour l’imprimerie et la Librairie...’.
Larousse II, 387.

First edition. ‘A satirical poem on the amours of various members of the nobility’ (ESTC) or, as the Monthly Review succinctly put it: ‘Poetical smut. Rochester revived.’ A number of imitations and replies were elicited. It is early work by Perry (formerly ‘Pirie’, 1756–1821), a Scottish journalist recently arrived in London ‘to try to break into the literary world’ (Oxford DNB). By the end of his career he had become ‘one of the most notable journalists of the age when the newspaper press was becoming established as a force in the country’ (ibid.)

Studies of Gymnotus electricus by members of Royal Society and their correspondents had captured the imagination of the British public in unexpected ways. While the investigations of Walsh and Hunter made genuine discoveries into the nature of electricity (which culminated in the invention of Volta’s battery), contemporary wits and pamphleteers took advantage of the phallic connotations of the eel and its electrical properties to deride the sexual peregrinations of London society.

In this copy several of the printed lacunae have been filled in by a contemporary hand, identifying Lady Sarah Bunbury and Lady Grafton, among others, as devotees of the electrical eel. Jackson, p. 52.

Les Animaux sensibles, intelligens et industrieux. pp. 160.

Les Enfans célèbres. pp. 154.

L’Antiquité: Mise a la Portée des Enfans. pp. 156, [4] (adverts).

Anecdotes Morales. pp. 156, [2].

Les Siècles de la France. pp. 160.

Le Siècle de Louis XIV, ou Vie des Personnages célèbres qui ont illustré ce siècle. pp. 160.

Six miniature volumes from Delbare’s Petit Bibliothécaire series for children. The individual volumes are very scarce (OCLC lists 2 or 3 of each); the Morgan library holds a comparable set of these 6 volumes in a miniature wooden bookcase. Ours retains part of its original box bearing the label of Alph[onse] Giroux, rue de Coq, Paris. Giroux was a well-known stationer and supplier of artists materials: he later became the sole supplier of Daguerre’s photographic apparatus. There were at least two other titles in the series: a Histoire de France, à l'usage de la jeunesse and a Nouvelle Histoire naturelle à l'usage de la jeunesse, both in 6 volumes.

Gay describes this gossipy little book as a “recueil de pièces satiriques, dirigées pour la plupart contre la clergé”, with the Jesuites du College de Louis le Grand and Louis XIV's great general, the Maréchal de Villars singled out for special attention. The anonymous author satirically describes himself as “Chevalier de l’Ordre de l’Industrie & de la Gibeciere” (‘chevalier d'industrie’ means swindler in French and ‘gibecièr’ is a gamebag or satchel), but his real identity remains a mystery. This is the second edition. A more common issue with the imprint 'la présente année' is considered variously to have been printed from 1700 to 1708. The BL catalogue suggests Holland as the place of publication for our edition. No source hazards a guess at the author.

De Courtin's work purports to be an early self-help manual which offers practical advice on dealing with jealousy in a marriage, which, as the advertisement proclaims: "De toutes les maladies de l'esprit, La Jalousie est assurément la plus dangereuse, & la plus difficile à guerir". Despite being described by Gay as an "ouvrage ennuyeux et mal ecrit", the frequency with which the title was reprinted after its first publication in 1764 is testament to its contemporary popularity.

The final work Octavie ou l'Epouse fidelle was first published in 1683; this imprint is not dated, but other undated copies are suggested to have been published c.1700. Passe Partout: Gay, III, 659; Graesse V, 155. 5 copies in OCLC and RLIN (Stanford, UCLA, Florida State, Indiana, Boston College), one copy of this edition on CCFr; Courton: Gay, III, 236, no copies of this edition recorded on CCFr.

Hollar’s small format plates of European women and their costume are dated from 1642-4 and followed his successful series Ornatus muliebris Anglicanus of 1640. The plates were obtained by eighteenth-century printseller Robert Sayer, who issued them several times (with captions in English added) right up until his death in 1794. His widow may also have continued issuing and selling them into the early nineteenth-century. They are one of the best sources for seventeenth-century lay female dress and include several English subjects (A Noble Woman, a Merchant’s Wife of London, an English Gentlewoman, A Merchant’s Daughter, Lady of the Court, a Countrywoman etc) together with women of France, Ireland, Holland, Germany, Denmark, Belgium and Austria. Three of the plates at the end depict men of religious orders. cf. Colas 1466 (second edition of 1643); Lipperheide 30.

An interesting selection of watercolours, drawings and lithographs by a Victorian woman. Some are typical, if very accomplished, holiday or genre scenes, but there is an interesting scattering of domestic scenes: a women sewing, another at a substantial treadle sewing machine, making mincemeat, crocheting, picking peas, and drawing in an album. Of special interest are 5 original and probably unique lithographs, evidently the work of the same artist, nicely demonstrating the contemporary enthusiasm for amateur lithography among women. Some are trials for letterheads, giving the address: ‘The Rookery, George Lane, Parish of Woodford’ [Essex]. Among the travel watercolours are some really lovely seaside scenes and a finely observed interior of a railway sleeping compartment on the Geneva-Paris line.

First edition, a carnival chapbook with burlesque dialogues. The first woodcut, as a frontispiece, depicts a cartful of fools led by a horse and pierrot, the second shows a mountebank poking fun at his audience. The term ‘Poissarde’ (literally, a fishwife) refers, in general, to coarse and vulgar language and is frequently to be found in chapbooks of the period. Gay I, 608. Worldcat: Wisconsin only outside Europe.

A delightful sequence of floral gowns, one for every month of the year, depicted in accomplished watercolour. The dress for each month includes seasonal flowers and fruit. The winter costumes represent ice and fire, with holly and ivy; in spring they are decked in leafy sprigs, buds and flowers; summer sees a predominance of grasses and meadow flowers, while autumn shows moths and grapes. The artist is presumably ‘Barenne’ as lettered on the upper cover, probably an accomplished amateur