Rare books, manuscripts, music, ephemera…
12th May 2015
As regular readers of this blog will know, something I particularly like is cross-cultural material. So this was a nice find: This is the first edition in English of the French Constitution of 1791, the first written constitution in France (based on the American model), and reluctantly accepted by Louis XVI. It’s a very rare book. The […]
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13th March 2012
These extraordinary engravings are the last words written by Louis XVI (his will, Christmas Day, 1792) and his wife, Marie-Antoinette (a letter to her sister-in-law, 6 October 1793), turned into silhouettes, probably in the 1830s. I’ll admit it took me a while to find out some information on the engraver, Alphonse Pélicier, who […]
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