First edition. One frontispiece.
Contemporary full blonde sheep binding. Smooth spine decorated, red morocco title-label. Headcap worn. One hole at foot. 2 corners slightly bumped. Rubbing.
First edition, quite rare; a counterfeit edition appeared on the same date in Amsterdam.
Contemporary full glazed and marbled blonde calf binding. Decorated smooth spines. Red morocco title and volume labels. A small lack at head of volume I. Five corners slightly bumped. Rubbing. Good copy.
Without doubt Bonnet's most ambitious and remarkable study which earned him the designation of father of modern biology. This work of theoretical biology drawing its source from multi-disciplinary reflection and its postulate from Leibniz (the immortality of the soul) claims that the Earth periodically suffers universal catastrophes which destroy almost all life and that the survivors each time rise one degree on the evolutionary scale. Bonnet was the first to use the term evolution in a biological context. The work also prefigures experimental psychology. There would exist in each being germs which pre-exist it and ensure the survival of the species, Bonnet's thesis announcing the theories and discoveries of genes. It was blindness that in Bonnet put a stop to experimentation and engaged him on the path of philosophical reflection.
New edition. The original was published in 1740, without the supplements. The Supplementum primum is dated 1754 and the secundum 1760. Illustrated with a frontispiece portrait, title vignettes, one plate in the first part of the Supplementum secundum and a second plate in the third part. The Supplementum parts have separate title pages.
Contemporary full brown calf bindings. Decorated spines with raised bands. Red morocco title labels and volume labels. Title label of volume III partly lacking. Lower headcap of the Supplementum primum worn and upper headcap likewise. Frontispiece detached.
The work forms an unquestionable reference compendium for medicine and chemistry (applied to medicine) in the 18th century. The German physician and physicist Friedrich Hoffmann (1660-1742) was professor of medicine and physics at the University of Halle, he was also an important practitioner and played a significant role in the development of modern medical chemistry.
First edition. Rare.
Contemporary full calf bindings. Smooth spines with gilt fillets. Red and black morocco title and volume labels. Gilt fillet borders on covers. All edges gilt. Some rubbing.
Antoine de La Salle (1754-1829), philosopher and scientist, was certainly one of the most curious thinkers of his time; his ideas, sometimes whimsical and muddled, made him the leader of the physico-moral school. Physiognomy naturally plays an important part in this theory. La Mechanique is both a classical treatise on physiognomy and a new way of considering the relationship between morals and the body from an educational perspective. Beyond this, La Mechanique is also a treatise on understanding and logic; one finds theories on phonetics and linguistics, in short everything that concerns man - moral, intellectual and physical. La Salle led an eventful life, made numerous voyages, visited America and Asia, studied the relationships between Buddhism and Christianity, wrote an unpublished Histoire de la Chine, and learned Arabic. Then, having left the navy, he traversed Europe, living in Spain then in Italy before returning to settle in Paris where he devoted himself to philosophy and the sciences.
First edition, profusely illustrated.
Publisher’s full black cloth binding, smooth spine, a fine copy complete with its illustrated dust jacket.
Our copy bears a dated and signed presentation inscription from Jean Dubuffet to Robert Dauchez, to whom he offered this work: "Jean Dubuffet adresse son amical salut à Robert Dauchez. Paris, nov 1975."
First edition of this issue of the pacifist review founded by the socialist and anarchist activist Henri Guilbeaux.
Contributions by Henri Guilbeaux "Propos actuels (Pacifistes - Historiens et journalistes - Minorités)", Marcel Martinet "Tu vas te battre !", Selma Lagerlöf "Le brouillard"...
Issue illustrated with a woodcut by Frans Masereel entitled "Demain".
True first edition of the French translation by J.-J. Cabanis.
Gay 197 and Bourquelot VI, 232 mention an 1832 edition from the same publisher under a different title: "Esquisses africaines." Given the identical collation, it is most likely the same 1831 edition issued under a new title.
Ink annotations at the head of the front cover, a few minor spots of foxing, and a faint waterstain along the fore-edge margin of the half-title, gradually fading on the following leaves.
Bound in modern half petrol-blue calf, smooth spine gilt-ruled in double fillets, red morocco title label, marbled paper boards, original covers preserved and mounted; binding signed by Laurenchet.
The author, an officer in the Royal Corps of Engineers, had published the work in English two years earlier, providing a highly relevant account of life in the Cape Colony and among the Kaffirs in the first quarter of the 19th century.
"There is some information respecting the lives of the Boers of the interior at this period, with a description of the Hottentots and Kaffirs, and of the slave system of the country, together with some sporting tales." Cf. Mendelssohn II, pp. 248–249.
Description of the Cape, society life, slave dances, masquerade ball, Cape wines, tiger hunting, the Hottentots, Grahamstown, the Kaffirs, plants and flowers, Great Fish River, the Bushmen, mountains and rivers, wild animals, birds, elephant hunting, Wesleyville, crossing the Kei River, Hinza's kraal, a stopover at St. Helena, Napoleon’s house and tomb, etc.
Several chapters are devoted to hunting (not in Thiébaud).
”And what can be said on the way Voyage is constructed? - It could not be more modern. Like the monograph of a contemporary ethnographer [...] I already said it, I repeat it: it is really the first founding model of an ethnologist's monograph” (Claude Lévi-Strauss)
Histoire d'un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil, dite Amérique [History of a voyage to the land of Brazil, otherwise called America]
Pour Jean Vignon, à Genève 1611, 8° (11x17,5cm), (80 p.) 489 pp. (15 p.), contemporary brown calf.
Illustrated with 8 full-page engravings with the folding plate titled “Pourtrait du combat entre les sauvages Tououpinambaoults & Margaias Ameriquains”, missing from most copies. Fourth edition, last one in French in the author's lifetime, after the first edition published in La Rochelle in 1578, and the ones published in 1580 and 1594. Two Geneva editions were published in Latin in 1586 and 1594.
Contemporary brown sprinkled calf binding, elaborately gilt spine, double gilt fillet on the covers. Spine-ends, joints and corners restored. Small tears on two pages, very small worm holes to the margins of some pages not affecting the text. Expertly restored folding plate with discreet strips of paper. Ink trace p. 324, not affecting reading. Nudity on p. 121 covered with an ink stroke. Contemporary marginal note on the dedication page.
Modest cobbler from Burgundy, Jean de Léry (1536-ca. 1613) turned to the Reformed church at an early age and made his first trip to Geneva in 1552 to study the Reformed Gospel under Calvin. In 1557, Calvin ordered him to join the Protestant settlement “France Antarctique” led by Nicolas de Villegagnon, on Coligny Island, located in the bay of Rio de Janeiro. Although religious harmony seemed to work at first, Léry and his fellow Protestants were driven off the island and had to live among Tupinambas Indians. He spent ten months with this warlike tribe but failed to evangelize them. His stay in South America deeply affected young traveler Jean de Léry, who was torn between his fascination for this cannibal people and his own rejection of paganism.
On his return to France in 1558, his friends urged him to write an account of his travels. However, Jean de Léry misplaced his manuscript twice and did not publish it until 1578. Histoire d'un voyage was an immediate success, and his vivid, detailed observations of the Tupinamba were published five times during the author's lifetime.
Nevertheless, the publication of this important work should be placed in the context of Europe marked by Religious Wars. L'Histoire d'un voyage is a direct response to the account entitled Les Singularitez de la France antarctique, published in 1557 by André Thévet, Catholic chaplain to the expedition of Vice-Admiral de Villegagnon. Léry thought the book of Thévet utterly false. Thévet only stayed a few weeks in Brazil in 1555 and also visited the Tupinamba people. Contrary to Thévet, engravings in Léry's book do not portray Tupinambas as repulsive cannibals.
He rather focuses on their celebration rituals and not human massacres, considering cannibalism to be a matter of honor in indigenous culture. He places this traditional and warlike rite in direct opposition to the slaughter of innocent Protestants, especially referring to the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. Jean de Léry even goes so far as to consider cannibals in Brazil – described by Thévet as ruthless savages – to have more humanity and dignity than Catholics who murder innocent Protestants without reason.
Far from going unnoticed, de Léry's account inspired Michel de Montaigne who wrote the chapter “Of Cannibals” in his famous Essays. The philosopher describes the anthropophagic practices reported by de Léry and compares them to the “barbarianism” of 16th-century Europe, denouncing what Christians inflict on each other in the name of religion: “I believe that there is more savagery in eating a man when he is alive than eating him when he is dead, more in tearing apart by tortures and the rack a body full of feeling, roasting it piece by piece, having it mauled and eaten by dogs and pigs—treatments which I have not only read about but seen done a short time ago, not among ancient enemies but among neighbours and fellow citizens, and, what is worse, under the pretext of piety and religion—than there is in cooking and eating a man once he is dead.”
Jean de Léry's humanist text was also widely read by Enlightenment philosophers, contributing to the myth of the “noble savage” dear to Montesquieu (Usbek in Persian Letters), Voltaire (Huron or the Pupil of Nature) or especially Rousseau (Discourse on Inequality).
In March 1935, Claude Lévi-Strauss set foot on Brazilian soil for the first time at twenty-seven years old, carrying a copy of de Léry with him: “I ambled along the Avenida Rio Branco, where once the Tupinamba villages stood; in my pocket was that breviary of the anthropologist, Jean de Léry” (A World on the Wane). In a 1994 interview with Dominique-Antoine Grisoni, he stresses once more the importance of this text, describing it as “a masterpiece of anthropological literature”: “The book is an enchantment. It is literature. Let us leave ethnology to the ethnologists and let the public read Histoire d'un voyage as a great literary work. And also as an extraordinary adventure novel.”
Rare copy of this “breviary of the anthropologist”, a seminal account praised by the greatest humanist thinkers.
