women

An attractive group of mostly floral watercolours by two Kentish women or girls of the Best family of Boxley, near Maidstone, Kent. The floral arrangements include roses, poppy, anemone, love-in-the-mist, convolvulus and sweet-pea.

First edition of Lydis’s astrological dream dictionary, complete with the moveable volvelle horoscope and striking plates printed in colours and gold. Among the numerous dream motifs Lydis illustrates: the whore, the angel, flight, locusts, insects (she actually depicts a spider), sea creatures, suicide and the devil.
A fragile book, this is among the early works by Austrian born Lydis (1887-1970) who settled in Paris in 1926. She became known for her daring prints celebrating same-sex and bisexual love (notably her 1926 portfolio, Lesbiennes) and she later illustrated numerous deluxe editions of Boccaccio, Louÿs, Baudelaire, Mirbeau and Valéry. Lydis had no formal artistic training (or at least her education is obscure) but her work was no doubt inspired by the freedom of twentieth-century Paris. She escaped the Nazis during the occupation, living briefly with her partner Erica Marx in England, before the couple emigrated to Buenos Aires. Correa, Mariette Lydis, 4.4 (with an estimated edition of 150 copies).

Copy number VII of 100 copies (total edition 111 copies only) printed for Les Cent Une, Société de femmes bibliophiles. All were printed on paper watermarked ‘Les Cent Une’ and this is copy number 5 of the 10 tirage de tete copies, and printed for member Madame Jacques Gompel. The text is after the 1556 French edition by André Jaulme (complete with authentic contractions) while the superb visual interpretations by Mariette Lydis include two of her characteristic decorated maps (both are signed). This is one of the early publications for the women’s book collecting club founded in Paris by the Princesse Schakhowskoy in 1926 as a direct riposte to ‘Les Cent’ — a bibliophile circle which then included no women among its members. Les Cent Une issued editions limited to the 101 members only and a handful of collaborators, usually no more than once a year, and is still in existence. Carteret IV, 322.

First edition of this survey of the fundamental changes made to female education in France between 1879 and 1887, France fundamentally reformed female education, moving from Catholic-dominated, basic instruction to a state-run, secular, and more academic system. Legislation such as the 1880 so-called Camille Sée law, established the first public secondary schools for girls (lycées) to produce educated ‘republican mothers,’ focusing on academic study rather than just needlework. The author was deputy director of the French ministry of public education. He dedicates the book to Camille Sée.

First edition of this rare practical programme for female secondary education. The so-called Duruy Reforms of 1865 instituted a new programme of secondary instruction geared towards practical careers in business and administration. While they also reformed primary education for girls, they did little for their secondary education, as noted in the foreword here by Madame Charles Sauvestre, instutrice. She concludes that the private initiatives are the only way of circumventing this, and the Guide pratique pour les écoles professionnelles de jeunes filles is a brief but complete guide to the practicalities and particularities of secondary schools for girls, starting with budget estimates for their foundation and maintenance. Much of detail is provided by the tables, which include three-year curricula with breakdowns of the necessary subjects, encompassing, letters, sciences, arts, and practical studies. ‘Letters’ comprise literacy in French and other living languages (not Latin), as well as history, geography, cosmography, domestic economy and ethics (religion is absent). ‘Sciences’ include mathematics (especially mental and commercial arithmetic), accounting, botany, zoology and mineralogy. ‘Arts’ include writing, drawing, geometry, ornament, industrial drawing, engraving, painting on porcelain and singing (formal music and panel painting notably absent). ‘Practical studies’ include couture (dressmaking), embroidery, tapestry, artificial flowers, lacemaking and paper crafts. Each of these subjects is broken down further into specific lessons with their place in a termly and weekly timetable divided into hours. A final chapters gives recommendations for the organisation of a library and a list of recommended books and authors. WorldCat: Library of Congress only outside Europe.

First edition, presentation copy, arguing for the proper provision of university education for women. The author surveys recent developments around the world, notably in the United States, where the women’s education movement has been most marked (and citing the Philadelphia medical school and the University of Michigan as examples) and in Great Britain (citing University College, London, Girton and Somerville Colleges at Cambridge and Oxford respectively). WorldCat locates a single copy: Università Bocconi, Milan.

First edition of one of the celebrated French clairvoyant’s earliest and rarest works, in which she reported an angelic appearance at Louis XVI’s tomb and revealed the contents of a tablet of prophecies for the era of the Restoration of the French monarchy. Like Le Normand’s later works it is couched in terms of dreams, predictions and angelic interventions. Marie-Anne Le Normand (1772–1843) was a celebrated (but also notorious) clairvoyant. Famed throughout Europe for her exclusive clientele, she popularised cartomancy and spawned an enormous wave of imitators. At the height of her career she claimed to have advised the likes of Robespierre, Talleyrand, Metternich, the Empress Josephine and the Russian Emperor Alexander; others argued that the whole thing was a sham, and she was frequently arrested, spending several weeks in prison. She is perhaps best remembered today for the cartomancy tarot decks named after her (’Lenormand cards’).
Le Normand was not only successful as a clairvoyant, but as a businesswoman, publisher and bookseller, with most of her works carrying her own imprint (as here) and sold at her shop in the rue de Tournon. At this early date she evidently operated her own press, with the half-title giving an address in nearby rue de Seine. Later works were generally printed for her by other presses. Caillet 6515. WorldCat: British Library only. While there are several copies in French libraries it is apparently absent from the Bibliothèque nationale. Arbour, Dictionnaire des femmes libraires en France, p. 343.

First edition of Le Norman’s predictions issued in the wake of the July Revolution of 1830 and the restoration of the monarchy under Louis Philippe, events welcomed by Le Normand, who saw the ghost of Louis XVI as her protector. Like her previous collections, it consists of accounts of her ‘visions intuitives’ and ‘Révélations politiques, symboliques, prophètiques, somnambulismes etc’. Throughout the nineteenth century, writers and pamphleteers repeated that tale of the ‘Little Red Man’ purported to be from an old folk tale dating back to the creation of the Tuileries Palace (1564) in which Le Petit Homme Rouge (a genie, or ghost) had appeared to the kings and queens living in the palace on the eve of great events, from Catherine de Medici to Napoleon. Here Le Normand uses him to recount the counsel given to Napoleon at Malmaison in 1793, that France could never be a democracy. Chapter five is set at the Scottish royal palace of Holyrood where the deposed Charles X had lived between 1796-1803
The title verso has an advert for eleven works hitherto published and still marketed by Le Normand at her shop in rue de Torunon, all priced, together with three fothcoming works ‘sous presse’ and a collected works in 10 volumes. Caillet 6514 (’Ouvrage peu commun’).

Presumed first or sole edition of this bilingual English-Japanese picture book showing the costumes of men and women of the various ranks of orders of Japanese society. It includes aristocratic and military subjects, as well as servants, scholars, labourers and craftspeople. The English preface states ‘These books are not only designed to please children, but to show the manners and customs of the ancient and modern people of Nippon. The fine illustrations afford an important aid in this respect. It is through the eye that understanding itself is most quickly reached’.
It was printed by the Poole Women’s College in Osaka. Arthur William Poole, after whom the Osaka Women’s School was renamed in 1890, was the first Anglican Bishop of Japan. The school had been founded as the Church Missionary Society school and its head teacher from 1890 to 1928 was the Durham-born missionary educator, Katherine Tristram, one of the early female graduates of the University of London. When she was appointed ‘there were at the school two other British women apart from Tristram, as well as eight Japanese teachers, including four women, and there were forty-nine pupils, of whom twenty-three were Christians’ (Oxford DNB).

‘Down, down, to Hell & say A Female Arm has made one bold Attempt to free her Country’ reads the speech emerging from Charlotte Corday’s mouth as she holds a bloodied dagger, just withdrawn from the body of Marat, who has fallen to the ground. The subtitle reads: ‘Who [Corday], while he [Marat] was villifying some of the more moderate men in the Convention and asserting that they should lose their heads stabed [sic] him saying, Villain thy death shall precede theirs.’ Charlotte Corday was condemned to the guillotine for the murder of Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat. Aged just 25 at her death, she was later nicknamed l’ange de l’assassinat (the Angel of Assassination) for her actions and was posthumously revered by Royalists for her stand against the injustices of the era of the Terror.
News of Marat’s assassination (on 13 July), without details, reached London on 22 July making this the earliest dated British print to depict her. Several later prints, including another by Gillray, depicted her trial and execution. BM Satires 8336; De Vinck 5298; Krumbhaar 1077.

Mandiargues eroto-surrealist poem ‘Dalila Exaltée’ paired with Bona’s extraordinary etched plate, in the first volume of this important series whose aim was to create a dialogue between contemporary poetry and modern printmaking.
Published under the direction of Odette Lazar-Vernet, the Paroles Peintes series was dedicated to the presentation of otherwise unpublished poetry and original etchings by an international roster of modernist artists. It ran to five volumes between 1962 and 1975. This is the first volume and presents the work of Bona and André Pieyre de Mandiargues alongside the work of Chagall, Ernst and Braque, among others.
This copy is number 193 copies of 200 copies (there were also 58 hors commerce copies). The texts are 14 poems by Aragon, Arp, Albert-Birot, Follain, Guillevic, Joyeux, Laude, Lescure, Liberati, Mandiargues, Paulhan, De Solier, Tapié and Tardieu paired with 14 plates by Chagall, Magnelli, Zadkine, Gilioli, Ubac, Bissière, Jacobsen, Fiorini, Ernst, Braque, Dufour, Lepatre and Vieillard.
Bona de Mandiargues, or simply ‘Bona’ (1926-2000) remains one of the most intriguing women of the French Surrealist movement. Best known for her fabric collages (she cut up her husband’s clothes and called them ragarts) she also illustrated a number of books, including several with etched plates issued in limited editions. A frank memoir of Bona’s childhood in an Italian villa, Vivre en Herbe (Gallimard, 2001), recalls the early inspiration of her flamboyant artist uncle, Filippo de Pisis, but also episodes of disturbing abuse and the terrors of the Second World War. In Paris in the 1940s she met the poet Pierre de Mandiargues (she married him, twice) and was drawn into the circle of André Breton. Taking inspiration from journeys to Mexico, the world of the Surrealists and her own ‘inner eye’, she pursued a singular artistic vision. She notably took the motif of the snail as an emblem (admiring its wholeness, its hermaphroditism and its self-sufficiency). Though her work was exhibited regularly, her first institutional retrospective was held at the Nivola Museum in Sardinia (2022).

A rare surrealist broadside, subscribed by André Breton, Bona and André Pieyre de Mandiargues among 29 others, against and exhibition and conference held at the Galerie Kléber by the right wing abstract artists Georges Mathieu and Simon Hantaï. The event, known as Les Ceremonies commemorated the Catholic Inquisition’s 1277 condemnation for heresy of the teachings of the Aristotelian scholar Siger de Brabant at the University of Paris, whereby the church attempted to halt the revival of classical thought in the Middle Ages. The Surrealists, shocked by the religious and deliberately reactionary nature of this event, responded with this broadside Coup de Semonce (’Warning Shot’) illustrated by Bona.
Bona de Mandiargues, or simply ‘Bona’ (1926-2000) remains one of the most intriguing women of the French Surrealist movement. Best known for her fabric collages (she cut up her husband’s clothes and called them ragarts) she also illustrated a number of books, including several with etched plates issued in limited editions. A frank memoir of Bona’s childhood in an Italian villa, Vivre en Herbe (Gallimard, 2001), recalls the early inspiration of her flamboyant artist uncle, Filippo de Pisis, but also episodes of disturbing abuse and the terrors of the Second World War. In Paris in the 1940s she met the poet Pierre de Mandiargues (she married him, twice) and was drawn into the circle of André Breton. Taking inspiration from journeys to Mexico, the world of the Surrealists and her own ‘inner eye’, she pursued a singular artistic vision. She notably took the motif of the snail as an emblem (admiring its wholeness, its hermaphroditism and its self-sufficiency). Though her work was exhibited regularly, her first institutional retrospective was held at the Nivola Museum in Sardinia (2022).

First edition, number 144 of 200 copies. Excerpts from the French philosopher Jean Grenier’s forthcoming autobiography (Gallimard, 1957) published for the ‘Chemin des Sources’ series by the Librairie Franco-Egyptienne in Cairo. It includes two small vignettes by Bona de Mandiargues (née Tibertelli), one a flying bird, the other a surrealist crouching fish-woman. Grenier is perhaps best remembered as mentor to the young Albert Camus at the Grand Lycée of Algiers. At the time of publication Bona was married to poet Pierre de Mandiargues, and was integrated into the surrealist circle around André Breton.
Bona de Mandiargues, or simply ‘Bona’ (1926-2000) remains one of the most intriguing women of the French Surrealist movement. Best known for her fabric collages (she cut up her husband’s clothes and called them ragarts) she also illustrated a number of books, including several with etched plates issued in limited editions. A frank memoir of Bona’s childhood in an Italian villa, Vivre en Herbe (Gallimard, 2001), recalls the early inspiration of her flamboyant artist uncle, Filippo de Pisis, but also episodes of disturbing abuse and the terrors of the Second World War. In Paris in the 1940s she met the poet Pierre de Mandiargues (she married him, twice) and was drawn into the circle of André Breton. Taking inspiration from journeys to Mexico, the world of the Surrealists and her own ‘inner eye’, she pursued a singular artistic vision. She notably took the motif of the snail as an emblem (admiring its wholeness, its hermaphroditism and its self-sufficiency). Though her work was exhibited regularly, her first institutional retrospective was held at the Nivola Museum in Sardinia (2022). Rare: Worldcat lists the Bn and Bibliothèque Jerôme Doucet copies in France, the Harvard copy in the US and another at the American University, Cairo.

The largest and most elaborate of Diane de Bournazel’s recent books, Rondes de nuit explores the possibilities and mysteries of the night, both from the human perspective of sleep, rest and dreaming, as well as the unseen life of the natural world in darkness and the infinite expanses of the night sky. At the centre of every page is a circular void, corresponding with depictions of the full moon at either end of the book, which can be seen in every opening. Each circular hole is illuminated to form a rebus or mandala, sometimes reminiscent of the visionary medieval manuscripts of the contemplative mystic, Hildegard of Bingen (notably Scivias and Liber divinorum operum). Elsewhere, figures float in space (one can be rocked back-and-forth as a moveable part) or participate in an eternal dance of life (and death). Lest we should see this as an evocation of the books of a distant past, a tiny floating space station against the night sky reminds of the artist’s contemporaneity.

First and only edition of this elegant little volume, a collection of witty verses and songs dedicated by the obviously cultivated members of the Normandy Société du Havre to their wives and daughters, sometimes on the occasion of a marriage or some other event. The sole copy located is in the Le Havre municipal library.

By an otherwise unidentified female artist, this is a rare large-format album of lithographs of the famous catholic Bavarian passion play at Oberammergau. The artist’s name is given only as initials ‘M. C. S. D’ on the plates and wrapper, but this copy bears a contemporary manuscript addition to the initials, which thus reads ‘M. C. S. Dawkins done by Herself’. It is additionally inscribed ‘with love’ to Major M. G. Best.
Performed decennially since 1634, the Oberammergau plays told the story of Christ’s passion, with a large cast drawn from local villages forming immense tableaux vivants with spoken biblical texts in the vernacular. In the nineteenth century it became a major attraction for well-to-do Grand Tourists and drew significant numbers of English visitors (so much so that the pioneering travel agent Thomas Cook established an Oberammergau office in 1880). The passion play was widely reported in contemporary English-language journals, adding to its attraction among English visitors (mainly protestant) who were curious about this ancient catholic theatrical tradition. We have been unable to discover anything substantial about the artist, but its fair to assume she made the journey to Oberammergau herself. WorldCat lists the V&A copy only in the UK. In the US there are copies at the University of Saint Mary of the Lake (IL) and WRHS (OH).

First edition of this souvenir account of a balloon ascent and parachute descent made by the pioneering French aeronaut, Élisa Garnerin, in Italy. An early pioneer of parachuting, Élisa had already made numerous drops in Paris and further afield in France, her performances often attracting enormous crowds. More than any other contemporary woman, it might be said without undue irony that her career was one of ups and downs — her celebrity as a balloonist and parachutist met with considerable opposition from the police, who found the crowds she drew to be troublesome, and her business probity was frequently questioned by her associates.

The illustrations in this pamphlet include a version of her circular portrait by Bouchardy made in Paris using the physionotrace apparatus invented by Gille-Louis Chrétien designed to copy physical features and simultaneously reduce them to an engraved plate. The folding plate shows Élisa borne aloft in an elegant gondola beneath her balloon, and then the gondola released from the balloon for her parachute descent.

A Caen-printed bibliothèque bleue edition of a title popular in the genre, with other editions from Paris, Tours and Lyons. The woodcut portrait was evidently old when the edition was printed, the impression showing a scatter of wormholes affecting La Belle Hélaine’s face, hair and shoulders. The text has it origins in a Middle French chanson de geste of the fourteenth century. cf. Hélot, La Bibliothèque bleue en Normandie (1928), 114 noting the degradation of the woodcut over its several issues, and this one specifically where: ‘la pauvre belle devient effrayante, avec un véritable trou à la place de l’oeil gauche’.

Two popular literary fairy tales. L’Oranger et l’abeille appeared first in Madame d’Aulnoy’s Contes des fées (1697) while La Reine de l'Ile des fleurs is taken from Les Illustres fées (1698), sometimes attributed to Madame d’Aulnoy and sometimes to the Chevalier de Mailly. Hélot, 177. Issued as part of Chalopin’s Contes des fées series.

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, Mesdames de la Lafayette, de Sévigné, du Chatelet, de Graffigny, Riccoboni, de Genlis, and de Duras. This complete edition of 1828 is rare.