Delteil, 2738
Light foxing throughout the plate and a tiny tear to the upper margin.
First edition in French of the translation, corrections, additions and clarifications, established by Joseph Toussaint Reinaud in 1845, from the Arabic text printed in 1811 under the care of Louis Langlès.
Bradel binding in full marbled paper, original covers preserved, binding signed Thomas Boichot.
Very rare copy without foxing.
First edition of which there were no grand papier (deluxe) copies, an advance (service de presse) copy.
Small foxing on covers marginally and slightly sunned, one joint cracked and glued down to foot, a small tear to head of spine.
Illustrated, as frontispiece, with a drawing by Etienne Dinet.
Handsome autograph inscription signed by Etienne Dinet to Georges Rochegrosse : "A G. Rochegrosse cordial souvenir de son vieil ami."
First edition in French, printed on vergé paper.
Publisher's Arabesque yellow paper binding by A. Lenègre, spine with gilt, black, and turquoise Arabic decorative motifs (head- and tail-pieces slightly rubbed), upper cover richly ornamented with Arabic decorative motifs in gilt, black and turquoise with a frame of gilt and black fillets, turquoise paper pastedowns and endpapers (corners slightly bumped), all edges gilt, a few small insignificant spots to lower cover.
Text by Alfred Edmund Brehm & Johannes Dumichen.
The work is illustrated with 24 watercolors after nature by Charles Werner.
A few small spots, mostly affecting endpapers.
Rare.
First edition of this work considered to be Grandville's masterpiece, with illustrations in first print.
Illustrated frontispiece, 36 colored illustrations and 146 in-text woodcuts in black.
Contemporary binding in blue half glazed calf, sunned spine with gilt arabesques, small holes at foot of spine, marbled paper boards, mould made endpapers and flyleaves, speckled edges.
This exuberant and prodigious production of Grandville and Delord (whose name is printed at the bottom of page 292), judged by its contemporaries as already being mad, was rediscovered by the Surrealists.
"Published in 1844 by éditions Fournier, Un autre monde is Grandville's masterpiece. The book is subtitled Transformations, visions, incarnations, ascensions, locomotions, explorations, travels, excursions, stations, cosmogonies, phantasmagorias, dreams, frolics, facetiae, whims, metamorphosis, zoomorphs, lithomorphosis, metempsychosis, apotheosis and other things. With its transformations, its inventions and its phantasmagoria, the work claims to reflect a changing era. Un autre monde recounts and illustrates the extraordinary travels of three neo-gods, Puff, Krackq and Hahblle. [...] It is indeed a philosophical journey that Grandville takes us on [...] The reader, led to a strange planet imagined by the artist, is invited, like Gulliver in the Country of Laputa, on a parodic journey of his philosophical, scientific, economic and religious ideas, of his passions, inventions and worries: romanticism, mechanisation, socialism, money, serial, publicity, anglomania, philanthropy, phrenology, etc." (Annie Renonciat, La Vie et l'œuvre de Grandville, Paris, ACR-Vilo, 1985).
Grandville's most sought-after work.
Autograph manuscripts and epigraphic studies with several drawn maps (108 leaves and 86 half-leaves, as well as 28 pages with numerous glued papers) in paper folders and a notebook with a cloth cover titled “Decrees of Alexandria”. Numerous tears to the margins and paper folders, stained cloth cover.
Important unpublished set of epigraphy manuscripts by Egyptologist Auguste Baillet (1834-1923), colleague and friend of Gaston Maspero, the leader of French Egyptology.
Precious notebooks gathering the remarkable philological work of Auguste Baillet, who carried out from the 1860s until his death in 1923 meticulous transcriptions and translations of hieroglyphic, Greek and demotic inscriptions on Egyptian temples, steles, statues, papyrii, and vases. He contributed to the titanic project of a catalog raisonné of Egyptian monuments started by Gaston Maspero. The countless pieces of paper covered with hieroglyphs transcribe the inscriptions of Egyptian monuments deposited in Paris and London museums or in private collections Auguste Baillet had the opportunity to study. Maps of the Nile delta, ancient Palestine and Syria are included in this prolific scientific work, as well as copies and personal translations of the founding texts of hieroglyphic epigraphy, notably those used by Champollion (Rosetta Stone, Turin Papyrus, Decree of Canopus, Book of the Dead...).
The notebooks bring together notes on the latest archaeological finds, as well as surveys and translations covering many periods of Egyptian history: Amarna, Ramesside, Ptolemaic... Baillet makes his own hypotheses and compares the scientific sources of his contemporaries and predecessors, in particular the founding works of Champollion, Maspero, his German colleagues Winckler, Lapsius, Brugsch or the British Flinders Petrie. One of the notebooks contains an unpublished article comparing the versions of the decree of Memphis of Prolemaeus V on the Rosetta Stone and the temple of Philae, following one of his published studies (Le Décret de Memphis et les inscriptions de Rosette et de Damanhour, 1888). He writes dozens of pages on the inscriptions from the monuments of Saïs and Philae, in spite of very incomplete epigraphic material, and draws on several pages very precise maps of Syria and Palestine under Akhenaten. Among many other studies and bibliographical references, he records on tiny, pasted papers an exhaustive epigraphic index of dignitaries appearing in the famous archives of Tell el Amarna discovered in 1891.
The importance of such handwritten documents is primordial for the young science of Egyptology at the end of the 19th century. At the time, knowledge was developing more through handwritten records and epistolary exchanges between scholars than through printed works. It was still very difficult to obtain hieroglyphic typeface in French provinces or even abroad. Manuscript collections of Egyptian texts such as this one therefore proved to be even more precious for research.
Archivist Auguste Baillet found his vocation as an Egyptologist after reading the famous Lettre à Dacier by Jean-François Champollion, unveiling for the first time the secret of hieroglyphs. Abandoning his position in the Empire's archives, he signed his first essays in the 1860s. He took part in the work of a burgeoning French school of Egyptology and studied namely the hieroglyphic numbering system in collaboration with the great scholar Théodule Devéria, as well as ancient Egyptian administrative organization and dialects. He also compared the still divergent methods of transcription of hieroglyphic characters, in a context of great international competition between British, German, and French scholars.
His son Jules Baillet inherited his father's passion and participated in several archaeological missions in Egypt. A fragment of a letter on the back of one of the manuscript leaves attests to the extraordinary intellectual emulation between father and son, who frequently corresponded on epigraphic questions “My dear Jules, [...] to make the passage of col. IV l. 4-8 correct, if not elegant, it is enough to move NE QUID [...] I am always relentless on the restitution of the decrees of Memphis and Alexandria” (letter, May 4, 1885). His studies on the temple of Philae present in this notebook were most certainly used by his son for the history of the temple he published in 1893. They also wrote several studies together and donated numerous Egyptian artifacts to the Orleans Museum of Art and History, coming from Jules Baillet's archaeological missions in Thebes.
The works of Baillet, apart from the manuscripts in this set, were published in 1905 in the prestigious Bibliothèque égyptologique directed by Gaston Maspero.