[Rarebooks] fa: LOUIS-SEBASTIEN MERCIER - MON BONNET DE NUIT - Le Ballon-Montgolfier, &c. 1784

[ArCh]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, October 11. Images and more details can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

https://tinyurl.com/y2u33wdl

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Louis-Sebastien Mercier: Mon Bonnet de Nuit. Neuchatel: l'Imprimerie de la Society Typographique, et se vend a Versailles chez Poincot, 1784. Two volumes, small 8vo (19 cm), in early/period mottled calf, page edged stained red, decorated endpapers; [4], 396 pp.; [4], 423, [1] pp.; with the half-titles, woodcut vignettes.

First or early edition (the issue points are somewhat nebulous) of the first two volumes of this work, complete in themselves, which Mercier would expand to four volumes in the following year. An important and eccentric collection of essays, pensées, contes, and musings by this French Enlightenment writer and dramatist, including "Le Ballon-Montgolfier," his rhapsodic eyewitness account of one of the earliest balloon ascensions, in Paris, on Dec. 1, 1783 ("l'annee des merveilles"). "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" (Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France,).

Bindings with bumping to the corners, wear to the spine ends, rubbing to the spine; old paper repairs to the bottom of both title-pages, damp-stain to the first 2 leaves of vol. I, light browning to the latter leaves of vol. II, a few occasional small spots and stains, but generally very clean and bright.