[Rarebooks] fa: AMOURS PASTORALES DE DAPHNIS ET CHLOE 1798 - Engravings/Bozerian Binding

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, February 14. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/j9np5bp

Thanks,
Ardwight Chamberlain

[Longus; Pierre Blanchard, trans.:] Les Amours Pastorales de Daphnis et Chloe. Traduction nouvelle, par Pierre B**. Avec quatre jolies figures dessinees par Monsiau, et gravee par Pauquet et Dupreel. Paris: chez Maradan [&] Desenne, an VI de la Republique [1798]. First edition thus; 12mo (16 cm) in full crimson morocco by Bozerian, all page edges gilt; xi, [1], [3]-169, [1] pp.; half-title; engraved frontispiece and four engraved plates, with tissue guards. Cohen-De Ricci v. I, 656.

A charmingly illustrated edition, and apparently quite uncommon: we find no other examples on OCLC but for one copy at Queen's College, Australia, with a publication date of 1800. Corners a bit bumped, light wear to the edges, darkening to the spine; frontispiece with shallow chipping to the fore-edge, contents with intermittent damp-stain to the lower corners, foxing to the margins of two of the plates, early ink identification of the translator on the title-page. Front paste-down with the engraved armorial bookplate of Ross Ambler Curran, early twentieth-century West Coast society figure and bibliophile.

Though we can't find the binder's mark, an old notation on the front endpaper identifies the binding as having been made by Bozerian ("rel. par Bozerian"). Jean-Claude Bozerian, or Bozerian the Elder (1762-1840), was a French bookbinder of the Napoleonic and Restoration periods whose bindings attracted the attention of such notable bibliophiles as William Beckford and Thomas Frognall Dibdin. The latter, however, was not uncritical: "The restorer, or the Father… of modern Book-binding in France was the Elder Bozerian: of whose productions the book amateurs of Paris are enthusiastically fond. Bozerian undoubtedly had his merits; but he was fond of gilt tooling to excess His ornaments are too minute and too profuse and… his choice of morocco is not always to my taste… He is however hailed as the legitimate restorer of that taste in binding which delighted the purchasers in the Augustan age of book-collecting. One merit must not be denied him: his boards are usually square and well measured…" (A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany).