[Rarebooks] fa: RESTIF DE LA BRETONNE - LE PALAIS-ROYAL 1790 - 3 vols. FINE in FINE BINDINGS

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, January 10. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/zlvxr3y

Thanks,
Ardwight Chamberlain

[Nicolas-Edmé Restif de la Bretonne:] Le Palais-Royal. Paris: au Palais-Royal dabord; puis Partout, même chés Guillot, libraire rue des Bernardins, 1790. FIRST EDITION. Three volumes, 12mo (17 cm), in full crimson morocco (by Belz-Niédrée?), spines with raised bands, lettered and elaborately decorated in gilt, gilt-tooled turn-ins, all page edges gilt, marbled endpapers; 280, 248, 288 pp.; with the half-titles and three folding engraved plates (complete). Cohen-Ricci v. II, 883.

A fine, handsome example of Restif de la Bretonne's notorious, pornographic tour of the Parisian demi-monde, published anonymously (for obvious reasons) and presented in three parts: Les Filles de l'Alée-des-soupirs (The Girls of the Alley of Sighs), Les Sunamites, and Les Converseuses, each illustrated with a folding plate. A vivid depiction of a world about to be swept aside forever by the terror, repression, and spirit of "moral regeneration" unleashed by the French Revolution. An uncommon title. Bindings with modest rubbing/wear to the joints and corners, spines slightly darkened, a ding to the front board of vol. I; contents with occasional faint spotting and toning to the leaves and the margins of the plates, one plate slightly creased from misfolding, small paper repair to a corner of vol. III's half-title; else very clean and fresh. A superb set. Front paste-downs with the engraved armorial bookplates of Ross Ambler Curran, early  twentieth-century West Coast society figure and bibliophile. There is no binder's mark or stamp that we can see, but a bookseller's catalogue entry tipped onto vol. I's front blank endpaper attributes the bindings to Belz-Niédrée.

Restif (or Rétif) de la Bretonne (1734-1806), printer, pamphleteer, pornographer, hack journalist, novelist, essayist, and shoe fetishist, was an indefatigable and prolific, if not always trustworthy, eyewitness to his times. Admired by Schiller and Benjamin Constant, loathed by the Marquis de Sade, and considered something of a patron saint by the Surrealists of the early twentieth-century, he was called "the gutter Rousseau" and "the Voltaire of the chambermaids" by his contemporaries. He coined the term "pornographe" and was an early advocate of communism.