Atlas historique de la France ancienne et moderne

First edition, first printing, complete with its engraved title page and dedication page, as well as its 59 maps, most of them multicoloured, all mounted on guards. Our copy is bound with the "Catalogue des ouvrages, tant anciens que modernes, du fonds du Sr Desnos, Ingénieur-Géographe pour les Globes & Sphères" for the year 1765.

Contemporary binding in full tree-calf, spine with five raised bands and gilt-tooled compartments decorated with pomegranate fleurons, red morocco lettering-piece, triple blind-ruled fillet border to boards, double gilt fillet to board edges, blue sprinkled edges, shell-pattern marbled pastedowns and endpapers. 

Headcaps missing, joints worn and split for several centimetres at various points, light scratches and scuffs to boards, worn board edges, bumped corners. Fine condition internally.

A pre-original version of this Atlas was published in 1764, with a frontispiece and 58 maps, a year before our edition. The present edition, recognised as the true first edition, was enriched with an additional map and a preliminary discourse. It also erroneously announces 60 maps whereas it in fact contains 59. Our copy is likely from the first printing, as it shares with the pre-original an analogous formula on the title page - "l'intelligence de l'histoire" - which would be replaced in subsequent printings by "la lecture de l'histoire."

"It ["Atlas historique"] was certainly conceived originally for M. Velly's "Histoire de France", continued by N. Villaret, but it proves equally useful for reading Mezeray, Father Daniel, and other historians."

"Compendium historiae litterariae novissimae, oder, Erlangische gelehrte Anmerkungen und Nachrichten auf das Jahr [...]", Volume 21

(Our own translation from the German)