Item
Fables de La Fontaine, Tome Premier
- Title
- en_US Fables de La Fontaine, Tome Premier
- Description
- en_US This is a hardbound book (hard cover)
- en_US Language note: French
- en_US Accompagnée d'une notice historique et de notes par le bon Walckenaer
- Creator
- en_US David, Jules See all items with this value
- Contributor
- en_US David, Jules
- Date
- 2016-01-25T16:29:45Z
- en_US 1998-07
- en_US 1839
- Date Available
- 2016-01-25T16:29:45Z
- Date Issued
- en_US 1839
- Abstract
- en_US This is one of my favorite acquisitions for the collection. It seems to reproduce the 1842 edition (Bassy #42, p. 268) in many respects, except that it is published by Armand Aubrée, publisher of the 1839 edition. Further, it has the title-page information of that 1839 edition, and the special frontispiece to the second volume includes a date of 1839. Its features from the 1842 Aubert edition include 1) the sensitive frontispiece of La Fontaine with poésie and morale at his sides; 2) the wonderful David illustrations (Bassy a), including a head-piece (about 3 by 2) for each fable and a smaller tail-piece for many ; 3) the twelve frontispieces (signed by Schaal and Laisné), one at the beginning of each book, each of which incorporates motifs from several fables in that book into a beautiful emblem (Bassy b); and six plates outside the text in each volume designed by such as Johannot, Grenier, and Lange and often engraved by Thompson (Bassy c). These added plates are not at the page numbers given by Bassy, but rather at the exact point in the book where they further illustrate their given fables. There is also another frontispiece added to each volume, complete with gold and coloring, and well described by Bassy, but they are exchanged here, with the musical shepherd and Perrin Dandin in the second volume and FG and the countryman with the serpent in the first volume. However, my volume seems to have them where they belong, since the latter two fables are Books I and VI, respectively! These two lovely volumes in leather with gilt page-edges all around were found on a day of hooky from the Leeds conference at one of the nicest used book stores I have been in. Among my favorite illustrations are: OF (61); the bald man between the two women he is courting (93); CJ (99); the highly balanced and intricate frontispiece to Book II, with the falling astronomer at its center; the tail-piece to BF, showing an academic copying things out of many books (216); the grisly tail-piece to The Mother, the Child, and the Wolf (233); the full-page plate of the two servants ready to kill the rooster (facing 261); and The Eagle and the Owl (281). How should we understand the human figures set into the full-page plate for TH (facing 309)? There are inscriptions on the first pages from 9.1.24 and March, '44. The only watermark I can find in the first fifty pages of either volume is a mark (D?) in the lower right corner of the added frontispiece of the first volume. Now that I have a second copy, perhaps of the 1838 and 1839 original printing (Bodemann 287.1), I note that this volume is very close to Bodemann's #287.3, published by Aubrée about 1840. Until I am certain, I will stay with the original date I have already assigned of 1839, which is found, by the way, on the added title-page that perhaps should have been inserted into Volume I rather than into Volume II!
- Identifier
- en_US Bodemann identifier 287.3
- en_US 3102 (Access ID)
- Language
- en_US fre
- Publisher
- en_US Armand Aubrée, Éditeur
- en_US Paris
- Subject
- en_US PQ1808 .A1 1839 See all items with this value
- en_US Jean de La Fontaine See all items with this value
- en_US Title Page Scanned See all items with this value
- Type
- en_US Book, Whole
- Item sets
- Carlson Fable Collection Books