Tag Archive: 0france

As it’s Hallowe’en, it seemed an appropriate day to share this, one of the books I shall be exhibiting next week at the Boston book fair: It’s a copy of the rare first edition of a curious novel, narrated by the wandering spirit of a man who, in a nod to the opening lines of […]

Orléans was a major eighteenth-century centre for the production of both block-printed papers (papiers dominotés) and popular prints (imagerie populaire), cut from wood, inked, printed, then stencilled by hand.  Jean-Baptiste Letourmy (also Letourmi, 1747–1800), was both dominotier—‘un des très grands producteurs de papiers dominotés de son temps’ (Valérie Hubert, Les papiers dominotés, 2016, p. 34)—and […]

This book, a first edition of Recherches pratiques sur les différentes manieres de traiter les maladies vénériennes (1770) by Jacques-Joseph de Gardane (1726–1786), docteur-régent at the University of Paris, exhibits something called a cut-flush binding.  As the online Language of Bindings Thesaurus explains, in such a binding ‘the boards and/or covering material are cut level […]

Wikipedia calls Charles Théveneau de Morande (1741–1805) a gutter journalist, blackmailer, and spy. He was certainly ‘a large and charismatic man of great physical strength and presence, traits he used to bully and intimidate.  Having received an education in Arnay-le-Duc and Dijon, Morande joined the French army and was possibly wounded serving in the Seven […]

This is a copy of the first edition of Les amours de Mirtil (‘Constantinople’, but actually Paris, 1761), attributed variously to Fontenelle, Claude-Louis-Michel de Sacy (though he would have been only fifteen at the time), and Marc-Ferdinand Groubentall de Linière.  There was another edition the same year, also with a fictitious ‘Constantinople’ imprint, but unillustrated.  Cohen–de Ricci […]

I like finding English books which were printed abroad. Published in Paris in 1893, this is a copy of the bilingual regulations—English, then French—of the Reunion Road Club, newly founded in France by American coaching fanatic, George William Tiffany (1842–1905). The son of a Boston banker, Tiffany was ‘one of the most astounding amateurs ever […]