[Rarebooks] fa: DIDEROT - LE NEVEU DE RAMEAU 1821 - First Edition/David Binding

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Happy 2016. 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 again,
Ardwight Chamberlain

Denis Diderot: Le Neveu de Rameau, Dialogue. Ouvrage posthume et inédit par Diderot. Paris: Delauney, Libraire, Palais-Royal, 1821. First edition thus; 8vo (21 cm), in three-quarter navy blue levant morocco by David with gilt-tooled spine decorations and lettering, marbled endpapers; [4] + 262 pp.; with the half-title and frontispiece. Carteret I, p. 216; Vicaire III, 250.

A "farce-tragedy" written by Diderot in 1761 but never published in his lifetime. The original manuscript went missing and wasn't found again until 1891. Thus, this first French edition is in fact a translation of Goethe's 1805 German translation of a copy of the manuscript given to him by Schiller. The narrator of the work is Jean-François Rameau, the  embittered nephew of the famous composer Jean-Philippe Rameau. In his introduction to the Oxford edition (Rameau's Nephew, 2006), Nicholas Cronk described it as "a work of dazzling paradox...which is in every way unique. It is arguably the greatest work of the French Enlightenment's greatest writer." Binding lightly rubbed and soiled, modest wear to the corners, scuffing to the top of the joints; scattered light foxing to the fore-edge of the text block and to the first two leaves, otherwise the contents are very clean and fresh, firmly and handsomely bound. Front paste-down with the engraved armorial bookplate of Ross Ambler Curran, early twentieth-century West Coast society figure and bibliophile.