Lot 177
Perrault, Charles
Rare Books, Manuscripts & Photographs
Auction: 16 January 2008 at 11:00 GMT
Description
Histoires ou contes du temps passé. Suivant la copie à Paris. [Amsterdam: Jacques Desbordes], 1697, 12mo (12.5 x 7cm), [vi], 174, engraved frontispiece, 7 small engraved illustrations by Antoine Clouzier, eighteenth-century panelled calf, lacks final leaf, frontispiece and title with brown stain towards inner margin, & frontispiece with small red ?sealing wax drop and upper blank corner torn away, rust-hole to F1, upper corner of lower board very worn with some loss of board and corner of last few leaves slightly frayed, other corners rubbed
Footnote
Note: Very scarce. This unauthorised edition was one of the three published before the end of 1697 and was probably printed in Amsterdam by Jacques Desbordes. It has the errata corrected and the frontispiece and illustrations reversed from the first authorised edition published the same year in Paris by Claude Barbin. Cf. Pierpont Morgan Library: Early children's books and their illustration, 104. The book is dedicated to "Mademoiselle", who was Elizabeth Charlotte d'Orléans, niece of Louis XIV, and is signed P. Darmancour, third son of the academician and poet Charles Perrault. Pierre, who took the name Darmancour, was sixteen or seventeen at the time and it is unclear, despite various theories, whether the young man composed the tales, or whether they were a father-son collaboration. The Bibliotheque Nationale copy [FRBNF32519146] has p.76 numbered 78 by mistake and page 168 misnumbered 268. The present copy has both pages numbered correctly. This copy has the pagination error (p.03 for 30) noted in the Pierpont Morgan copy which does not occur in the Osborne copy. Osborne catalogue II: 608; Brunet, Supplement, Vol II, p. 205.