[Rarebooks] fa: JEAN DE LA BRUYERE - CARACTERES 1824 - Period Bindings by Simier

[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 again,
Ardwight Chamberlain

Jean de La Bruyere: Les Caracteres de La Bruyere, suivis des Caracteres de Theophraste, traduits du Grec par le meme. Paris: chez Lefèvre, 1824. Two volumes, 8vo (23 cm), bound in early/period red straight-grained morocco by Simier, the covers decorated in gilt and blind, gilt-tooled spines and turn-ins; all page edges gilt, marbled endpapers; half-titles, frontispiece portrait. Vicaire IV, 786.

Modest wear and soiling to the bindings, spines slightly darkened, a few corners bumped; scattered spotting to the text; cockling and light damp-staining to the bottom fore-corners of the leaves in vol. II, one corner torn away not affecting any text. Front paste-down with the bookplate of Ross Ambler Curran, early twentieth-century West Coast society figure and bibliophile. In all, a handsome presentation of La Bruyere's thinly disguised and often highly critical character sketches of his seventeenth-century contemporaries. The bindings are by Rene Simier (1772-1843), one of the leading French bookbinders of the early nineteenth century, who crafted fine bindings for Napoleon as well as for the last Bourbon kings, as evidenced by his gilt-stamped signature at the foot of vol. I: "Simier. R[elieur]. du Roi." The surviving contents of Simier's workshop were sold at a major auction in Paris in 2010.