Search

A delightful illustrated set of sixteen moral tales in verse written for the use of children. The majority are cautionary tales, warning children against the bad effects of indiscretion, jealousy, anger, curiosity, obstinacy and presumption. Each of the tales is followed by an explicatory moral, also in verse, and a delightful, slightly naive, engraved plate. Alongside the cautionary tales are verse tales depicting the value of value of various virtues such as gratitude and the careful use of talents, also tales of birth and circumstance and a dialogue between a governess, her pupil and a gardener.
In his preface, the ‘editor’ discusses his interest in children’s education and the importance of combining clarity and simplicity in the text with a message that is easy for a child to remember. He adds that it is this work’s success in the early editions in France that has persuaded him to offer it to the young people of England. A second preface, by the author, warns against the fables of La Fontaine as the earliest education for young children and explains that he has created these first tales - ‘of which many more are needed’, he grants - in order to present the ‘measure of morality’ without resorting to the world of fairyland.
First published in Paris in 1781, this was a popular work in France; it was also reprinted by the Walther brothers in Dresden, 1790.

A scarce edition of Marmontel’s block-buster, published in the same year as the first edition. MMF list no less than ELEVEN Paris editions of 1777, all printed by Lacombe, with the present edition listed as the second, with its imprint clearly claiming a Paris and Lacombe publication: ‘A Paris, Chez Lacombe, Libraire, rue de Tournon, près le Luxembourg’. However, ESTC includes this edition as a piracy, ‘probably printed in Dublin’, with a false Paris address. This would account for the error on the title page, where the masculine word for volume is made feminine: ‘Tome Première / Tome Seconde’, a mistake no French printer or compositor would make.
Critic, novelist and playwright, Marmontel began life as the son of a poor tailor before coming to Paris on the advice of Voltaire to pursue a career in literature. His Contes moraux, 1755-1765, fictional tales praising philosophy and the practice of virtue, were enormously popular in France and throughout Europe, particularly in England where there were numerous translations. But it was his historical romance, Belisaire, with its plea for civil toleration of Protestants, that brought him most lasting fame and became one of the most controversial novels of its time, condemned both by the Sorbonne and the archbishop of Paris. Les Incas ou la Déstruction de l’Empire du Perou is Marmontel’s answer to the censure he received for Bélisaire. In this novel, he describes the cruelties in Spanish America and demonstrates that they are entirely the result of the religious intolerance of the invaders.

An apparently unrecorded edition of this popular work on children’s education by Saint Jean-Baptiste de la Salle, educational reformer, priest and founder of the Institue of the Brothers of the Christian Schools. He is celebrated by the Catholic Church as the Patron Saint of Teachers of Youth. He was also related to Claude Moët, founder of Moët & Chandon. Unpopular during his lifetime for his insistence on bridging the social divide, for devoting his life to the education of the children of artisans and the poor - and for inviting teachers to live in his house so that he could train them - La Salle’s legacy continues today with over 1000 educational centres worldwide.
The first part of his text is devoted to the body, encouraging cleanliness and good manners and warning against frowning, nose picking, knuckle-cracking and spitting. In the second part he proceeds to discuss clothes, diet and recreation, including social conventions, basic habits of honesty and the solving of disagreements. In a curious final section he lists easily confused words, such as ‘bois’ for wood and ‘bois’ for I drink.
This edition was printed by Anne-Charles-François-Bonaventure Poignant, bookseller, bookbinder, playing card and second hand clothes seller, and Chartres’ first lithographic printer. His published output includes a catechism, a Latin grammar and a Psalter, all for the use of local schoolchildren.

Extracts of some twenty works by the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, utopian, diplomat, academicien and economist, prophet of the League of Nations, best known for his Projet pour rendre la Paix perpetuelle en Europe, 1713-17. 'Some of his other schemes called for the inauguration of political, economic and demographical statistics; the establishment of an official press; the reformation of taxation by the institution of a tax graduated according to income or, as he proposed in another project, according to capital; the suppression of begging; the improvement of the judicial system; the building of roads; the creation of a system of public instruction; the vocational and professional training of children; the elimination of most of the inequalities between the sexes in matters of education; and certain advanced innovations in pedagogical method' (Palgrave III, 345).
This selection of his works, selected and edited by Pons-Augustin Alletz, includes essays on population, social welfare, hospitals, child care, finance, commerce and education. 'The works of this 'homme de bien', as he was called in his time, are rare and difficult to collect' (ibid).

The first edition of this work was published by Maradan in 1804, although it had been serialised in the Bibliothèque des Romans and parts of it had been pirated and printed in various journals. It was enormously popular and ran to several editions. A continuation was published, also by Maradan, under the title Suite des Souvenirs de Félicie, Paris 1807. With a dedication to Madame de Genlis’ brother, the original preface to the 1804 edition in which she discusses the work’s early popularity and compares it to the Souvenirs of Madame de Caylus and of Madame Necker. It also includes the fictional introduction by the editor of the works of the late eponymous author.
‘Cet ouvrage superficiel et frivole n’est fait ni pour les penseurs ni pour les philosophes, mais il plaira peut-êtreà ceux qui aiment le naturel et la variété’ (Avertissement de l’Editeur des OEuvres posthumes de madame de L***, p. 11).

A scarce epistolary novel which examines the types and nature of love through a selection of episodes narrated by an abundance of characters. Attributed to an obscure lawyer from Rouen, this is erotic fiction presented as scientific abstract, with titles, divisions and subdivisions suggesting a philosophy of love in an attempt to ennoble this loosely connected collection of licentious stories. As the title suggests, the work is divided into three parts, for the ‘three ages’ of love: when love is young, when it enters middle age and finally when it reaches decrepitud: ‘le tems où l’Amour se déclare; celui de son progrès; celui de son déclin’ (Avertissement, p. 49). After a wide-ranging preface, the introductory material begins with ‘Naissance de ce Porte-Feuille’ (pp. xiii-xxxi), signed by Le Milord Sédrei, and ‘Dessein de cet Ouvrage’, which is presented in two parts, ‘Définition de l’Amour; distinction de deux Amours, & déclaration d’Amour de chacun des deux sexes’ and ‘Division générale ou les trois âges de l’Amour’. The introduction concludes with Letter VI, M. Méabbe à M. Ozime, under the subtitle ‘Le Temple de l’Amour. Songe’, where the author of the letter is awoken from his dream by a kiss from his his mistress Rosette. The first part, ‘L’Amour dans son enfance’, begins with an illustration of the phrase ‘Les influences de l’Amour sur un coeur’, in a letter from M. d’Ormeville to a friend, in which he describes his sixteen year old lover, the daughter of a famous actress.
There appear to have been two distinct editions published by Gaspard Menippe in 1769 under the same imprint. MMF and Gay both cite an edition with pp. xxxvi, 107 and have no mention of this edition, while OCLC locates four copies of this edition and none of the other. On the traditional assumption that the longer pagination should have priority - given the ease of resetting from text rather than manuscript - that would suggest this to be the first printing. The work was later expanded by M. de Jouy and published as a continuation of his Galerie des femmes, Amsterdam [Paris], 1802.
Gay is fairly damning of this work: ‘Scènes à tiroir. Série de lettres écrit par des personnages à noms bizarres. Livre mal fait’. The names are a little bizarre, but the text is none the worse for being peopled with lovers called ‘Mademoiselle Xiphaa’, ‘ma chère Yxi’, M. de Walfonze, Fanaol and Amévine, Vimarak, Paswau and Ravoul. The latter’s exploits include scaling the walls of a convent and obtaining the keys to the dormitory, in the true tradition of Clerico-Galante fiction.

An attractive, unsophisticated copy of the first edition of ‘Lettre à un Amateur de la Peinture’ by Christian Ludwig von Hagedorn, one of the most important art historiographers of the Enlightenment. A diplomat and director of the royal picture collection in Dresden, Hagedorn also assembled a significant collection of paintings, which are described and offered for sale in this work. Hagedorn’s ‘Lettre’, which occupies the first twenty pages, is followed by ‘Eclaircissemens historiques’, by Franz Christoph Janneck, the Austrian painter known for his paintings of festive gatherings who was much admired by Hagedorn. Janneck provides a description of the works in Hagedorn’s private collection, along with a series of biographical sketches and anecdotal digressions about various other painters. Janneck provides a wealth of information about both greater and lesser artists: the index designates those painters represented in the collection as well as other artists discussed in the digressions. Those painters thought to feature for the first time in a volume about painting are marked with an asterisk.
The frontispiece is an etching by Pierre-Jules Hutin (ca. 1720-1763), notable for its inclusion of a female figure engaged in aesthetic debate. The engraving depicts an artist’s studio with two groups of figures deep in discussion. In the foreground is a painting of Leda and the Swan with three figures clustered around it. Standing immediately next to the painting is a woman intently discussing the painting with two male connoisseurs. The more elegant of the men is seated, the other man holds up a glass to the painting and the woman is holding either a pointer or a paint brush.

A scarce use of ‘Cosmopolite’, a word first coined by Diogenes the Cynic (c. 412-323 BC) from the Greek words ‘kosmos’ (the world, the universe) and ‘polites’ (citizen), used in this instance to describe an author. After a brief appearance in French literature in the sixteenth century, the word ‘Cosmopolite’ had largely fallen into disuse until the middle of the eighteenth century, when there was a surge in its use, both in describing otherwise anonymous authors and in defining fictional characters. In this instance, the word is used as a marketing plot, a self-conscious identification of the author with what was at this time an edgy word, much in vogue in enlightenment circles - a badge of honour denoting tolerance and enlightenment - in order to bridge the gap between nations, as this is essentially a piece of political propoganda written to further foreign relations between the Netherlands and America. At the heart of this letter is a discussion of nationhood, liberty and the present alliances and security of Amsterdam and Holland.

A scarce survival of an anonymous attack on Madame de Charrière, claiming to be written by her as a supplement to her Lettres Neuchâteloises. In these two supposedly additional letters, Madame de Charrière is presented as being self-abnegating and in complete agreement with the contemporary criticisms of herself and her writing. ‘Oui, je l’avoue’, begins the first letter, ‘plaire, briller par l’esprit; voilà ce qui peut seul m’intéresser: aucune considération ne m’arrête’. She ‘admits’ that the Lettres de Lausanne had no moral purpose and that she knew nothing of the city, having spent less than 24 hours there. In the second letter the confessional tone of the ‘author’ goes even further: ‘I want to talk about myself a moment’, it begins, ‘I am rude on principle, contemptuous by system, bizarre by vanity... I desire only the pleasures of pride, and a restless spirit follows me everywhere’.

Isabelle de Charrière’s two major epistolary novels, Lettres Neuchâteloises, Amsterdam 1784 and Lettres écrites de Lausanne, Toulouse 1785, together with its genuine continuation, Caliste, ou la continuation des Lettres écrites de Lausanne, were outspoken attacks on Swiss society in which she argued against political corruption and aristocratic privilege in favour of moral, religious and social emancipation. It is not entirely surprising that her writings provoked such an attack as this. What is particularly interesting is the spiteful personal nature of this attack

An attractive copy of one of the dozens of reprints of Montesquieu’s seminal work, published under the same fictional Cologne imprint as the first edition of 1721. This edition includes the full 150 letters, as in the original printing, rather than the 140 included in Montesquieu’s expurgated version. Not originally intended as a novel, it spawned so many imitations in the form of novels (Lettres juives, Lettres chinoises, Lettres d’une Péruvienne etc) that even Montesquieu realised he had started a vogue: ‘My Lettres persanes taught people to write letter-novels’ (Montesquieu’s Mes Pensées: no. 1621).

An attractive set of a scarce chivalric romance by Charles Joseph de Mayer, mostly remembered for his impressive Cabinet des fées, a forty-one volume collection of fairy tales published between 1785 and 1789. The present novel, intended as a continuation of Tressan’s version of Amadis de Gaul, published in 1779, follows the adventures of Lisvart, the son of the Emperor of Constantinople. In keeping with Mayer’s interest in the fairy tale, Lisvart de Grèce includes plenty of fantastical sequences alongside the chivalric. In a fascinating introduction, in which Mayer talks of his involvement with Tressan in the Bibliothèque universelle des romans and discusses the state of French literature, he advises readers to start by reading Tressan’s work before moving on to his continuation, to save confusion between the different characters and generations. He suggests that this is a good time to publish the romances of chivalry, to restore a little French colour into a literature that has of late been besieged by translations from the English and the German. Following the lead of Tressan, Mayer has also attempted to update the genre to make it more accessible to a contemporary audience.
‘J’ai cru devoir imiter le Comte de Tressan... supprimer, ajouter, créer, polir, substituer, arrondir, & rapprocher un peu de nos tems & de nos mœurs la scene ancienne & le vieux théâtre; briser enfin le verre d’un tableau de lanterne magique, pour faire des tableaux vrais & les portraits ressemblans... Je devrois peut-être faire observer que le moment de mettre en lumière les Romans de Chevalerie est plus favorable qu’on ne feroit tenté de le croire. Depuis quelques années, la France ne reçoit & ne lit que des traductions de Romans Anglois, & des fictions prises dans les Auteurs Allemands: il me semble que toutes nos couleurs soient épuisées... il paroît même que les teintes légeres réussiroient; car nos passions paroissent entierement purgées de cette maniere noire qui a marqué nos Romans’ (pp. vi-x).
The novel is accompanied by a sequence of twelve songs, which accompany the text on engraved plates in which both words and musical score are given. These are composed by Pierre-Jean Porro (1750-1831), the influential composer and guitarist. Following the novel are two short stories by Mayer, Amours de Guillaume de St.- Vallier, Troubadour, (V, 255-294) and Amours de Jeanne, Reine de Jérusalem, de Naples, de Sicile, Comtesse de Provence; Roman Historique, (V, 295-330).

A ‘shop of riddles’, this scarce volume of poetry includes three hundred and thirty-seven enigmatic poems or verse riddles on subjects as diverse as the moon, the game of chess, glasses (‘nous sommes deux soeurs de même âge’), carnivals, fables, the opera and a pearl necklace. A key to the solutions is found at the back of the work.

An epistolary novel by Auguste Lafontaine, set in Russia in the early eighteenth century and translated by Isabelle de Montolieu, a writer strongly influenced by the German and English literature of the time. Lafontaine’s romantic fiction had a wide readership among women throughout Europe and was enormously popular in England. Summers lists some thirty titles published in English, in some cases in more than one version, many of which, including the present novel, were printed by the Minerva Press. The present novel, first published as Fedor und Marie in 1803, was translated as Dolgorucki and Menzikoff, A Russian Tale, London, Minerva Press, 1805 (see Blakey p. 214). There was also a three volume ‘Londres’ edition of this French translation, also 1804, but Cioranescu gives precedence to this Paris edition.

A good copy of a scarce Munich dissertation on the classification of the sciences, presented under the supervision of the Benedictine philosopher, Leonardo Neumayr and drawing on the work of Moses Mendelsohn, Condillac, Plattner and Wolff. Opening with a section on Logic, the dissertation is neatly presented in clear sections and puts forward a scheme for the division of the sciences. Further sections are devoted to the study of Ontology, Psychology, Natural Theology and Mathematics.

The first and most famous of Brantôme’s Mémoires, this volume includes the outspoken Vies des Dames Illustres. Written after his retirement from public life in 1589, Brantôme had left instructions that his Mémoires should be published, but it was not until 1665 that this first volume appeared. Written in a frank, conversational manner, Brantôme describes his years at the centre of the glittering court and gives detailed and highly personal accounts of his contemporaries. His accounts give a highly colourful picture of court life and his descriptions of the sex lives of the ladies of the court are striking because of his ability to present graphic detail in a straightforward and almost bland style, as if he were talking about the weather.

A light-hearted sentimental novel set in diplomatic circles in Brussels and the Hague. The author, an officer in the cavalry, was a popular novelist ‘connu comme littérateur dans le genre léger où il a fait preuve d’un certain esprit’ (DLF). Desboulmiers, as he was known, also had an interest in the theatre and a broad knowledge of its history. His two most important works on theatre history, Histoire anecdotique et raisonnée du théâtre italien, Paris 1769 and Histoire du théâtre de l’Opéra-Comique, Paris 1769, are still consulted today.
This is one of three novels first published in 1766 by Desboulmiers, the others being De tout un peu ou les amusements de la campagne, Amsterdam 1766 and Honny soit qui mal y pense ou histoires de filles célebres du XVIIIe siècle, Londres 1766. This is the second of two editions of this work which appeared in the same year under the same imprint. MMF record a further three editions.

An important economic treatise on the causes of financial distress in France, with suggested political and economic solutions. Boullainvilliers’ frank exposé of the last years of Louis XIV’s reign was rather too much for the authorities, who had it condemned on publication. His political writings - ‘original to the point of eccentricity’, says Christopher Betts in the New Oxford Companion to Literature in French - were hostile to royal policy and express an extreme version of feudalism, ‘le chef d’œuvre de l’esprit humain’, in which power is returned from the king to the nobles. An expansion of the economic sections of his more famous État de la France, the present work is dedicated to the duc d’Orléans. In common with all Boulainvilliers’ works, the present memoir was published posthumously and outside France.
Boulainvilliers presents his argument in six parts or memoirs, the most striking of which is the second, that comes down heavily against the financiers and proposes a separate office for the state treasure, the third memoir, which attacks arbitrary taxation and the sixth, particularly resonant, which attacks poor financial administration. Boulainvilliers may have been an eccentric, but many of his economic theories were well ahead of his time and anticipated the ideas of the physiocrats, by whom he was much admired.
‘Some scholars happily ascribe all six memoranda under consideration to Boulainvilliers in order (it appears) to enhance his reputation - for once an attractive reputation - as an aristocratic liberal or progressive reformer of the 18th century. In fact, one may exclude from the Boulainvilliers corpus two or even three of the six memoranda under consideration. In keeping with Boulainvilliers' character, the author of memorandum 1 claims no expertise in fiscal matters, recommends instead that some faithful, enlightened, and wise persons screen any financial advice or projects submitted to the regent, and urges him above all to assemble the Estates. Equally consonant with Boullainvilliers' character is memorandum 4’ (H. A. Ellis, S. 244f).

Second edition of Dieudonné Thiebault’s detailed memoirs of the court of Frederick II covering Frederick himself, his family, the court, the Academy, schools, philosophers and intellectuals, and the military and civil government of Prussia. Thiebault had first gone to Berlin in 1765 to take up a post as Professor of Literature at the Academy on the recommendation of d’Alembert. He subsequently became an advisor to the king, helping him with his addresses to the Académie des sciences de Berlin and editing many of his works prior to publication. Thiebault remained in Berlin for twenty years, where he was given a place in the Academy and was granted a pension by Frederick.

Provenance: Michel-Frédéric Pillet-Will (1781-1860), with black labels lettered ‘Pillet-Will’ in gilt at the foot of the spines.

An attractive copy of one of Mercier's most important works, a collection of short essays, some written in the form of dream sequences, and one or two 'contes'. Some parts had previously been published in Mercier's Songes philosophiques, 1768, but this was very much part of Mecier's distinctive style. 'He published prodigiously by recycling passages from one book to another and stretching essays into multi-volume tracts. His major works - L'An 2440, Tableau de Paris, and Mon Bonnet de Nuit - therefore have a formless character. They are composed of short chapters on a wide variety of subjects, which Mercier cobbled together without worrying about narrative coherence. When a book caught on, he expanded it, cutting and pasting and fighting off pirates as he advanced from one edition to the next. The result was never elegant, but it often had a gripping quality, because Mercier knew how to observe the world around him and to make it come alive in anecdotes and essays. There is no better writer to consult if one wants to get some idea of how Paris looked, sounded, smelled, and felt on the eve of the Revolution' (Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers, 1996, p. 118).
The work is made up of two distinct parts. In the first edition, volumes III and IV bear exactly the same imprint as the present edition but have a different pagination, viz. pp. [iv], 390; [iv], 382. It was inordinately popular and many editions followed, both in two and in four volumes. MMF lists a total of twenty-six editions. The final two volumes were also published under the title, Mon Bonnet du Matin.

An unusual project in that the plates came first: starting in 1775 with a first set of a dozen engravings by Freudenberg published by Prault, which were followed by a second and third set of engravings by Moreau. Restif was then approached to provide a text to accompany Moreau’s plates. The full work was first published in Neuwied sur le Rhin, 1789 in a sumptuous folio edition with 36 pages of text and Moreau’s original 26 plates.
The first English piracy was published by Charles Dilly in 1790 and has the same collation as the present edition, but was published with only two engraved plates, providing frontispieces to each of the two volumes. The second English piracy noted by Rives Child (’Londres 1793’), was published with a new suite of 26 plates, one for each of the 26 chapters, newly interpreted after the English style, published by W. Hinton and with captions in English and French. However, internal evidence suggests that the present edition is a reissue of Rives Child XXXVI/2, the Charles Dilly edition with the frontispieces, as a footnote in the Avis des Editeurs states: ‘Dans l’Edition originaire de cet Ouvrage, on a embelli chaque histoire d’une estampe intéressante, dessinée & gravée par M. Moreau le jeune... Le Libraire qui présente au Public cette Edition, a choisi deux de ces Estampes, qu’il a fait graver par M. Heath; & il en a placé à la tête de chaque Volume’ (I, ii). This edition therefore appears to be an unrecorded piracy, being a reprint of the Dilly edition with two frontispieces rather than the full suite of anglicised Moreau plates. However, this copy unfortunately has no plates: although uncut and in contemporary boards, a reback and new spine make it hard to know whether they were ever present. Despite this, we offer this copy as an interesting Restif text which was not often reprinted and is scarce in any edition.