Contes et nouvelles en vers

Substantially revised reissue of the first illustrated edition of the Contes et nouvelles en vers, published ten years earlier, in 1685, by the same Henry Desbordes. Two parts bound in one 12mo volume: (16) 236 pp. (2); (8) 216 pp. (2).

The illustration comprises two frontispieces and 58 half-page vignettes after Romeyn de Hooghe. Yet this apparent continuity with the 1685 edition conceals a thorough reworking. The earlier copperplates were not simply reused: the compositions were re-engraved in reverse. The frontispiece to the first volume thus reproduces the 1685 design in mirror image, now without its date, bookseller's name or signature; the frontispiece to the second volume is an entirely new composition. Hédé-Haüy likewise notes that the vignettes themselves were reversed and newly engraved.

The final four tales constitute a further departure from the 1685 edition. Previously published in the Ouvrages de prose et de poésie des sieurs de Maucroix et de La Fontaine, they are here incorporated into the Contes and accompanied by large anonymous engravings. Both text and illustration were therefore enlarged: beneath the appearance of a new issue of the 1685 book, the 1695 edition substantially alters its character.

Contemporary full olive morocco with a bronze-green tone, spine with raised bands and gilt decoration, red morocco lettering-piece, covers framed with a gilt triple fillet, gilt inner border, all edges gilt. Paper uniformly toned. A very handsome copy, particularly attractive in contemporary green morocco.

Romeyn de Hooghe had supplied the 1685 edition with its first major cycle of illustrations, comprising a frontispiece and 58 engraved compositions. His lively, narrative and often theatrical manner is particularly well suited to the freedom of La Fontaine's tales. Ten years later, the engravers responsible for the present edition made no attempt to modernise his inventions: by reversing and re-engraving them, they instead preserved a graphic language still firmly rooted in the Baroque culture of the seventeenth century.

This is precisely what distinguishes the book from the great illustrated editions that would become one of the glories of French eighteenth-century bibliophily. Cohen noted that many collectors placed this edition among the fine illustrated books of the following century; yet De Hooghe's compositions possess neither their polished grace nor their decorative elegance. The scenes remain more animated, the movement sharper, the narrative more immediate: the image seems less to comment upon the tale than to continue its action.

The edition bears the date 1695, the year of La Fontaine's death. The four additional tales thus extend, in one of the last early forms of the collection, the vein of free and licentious storytelling that had accompanied the poet for several decades. The Amsterdam imprint repeats that of Henry Desbordes, publisher of the first illustrated edition; Brunet and later bibliographers have generally regarded the 1695 printing as having been produced in Paris under this foreign imprint, an attribution best retained with some caution in the absence of decisive material evidence.

A very handsome copy in contemporary olive morocco of this substantially reworked edition of the Contes, enlarged by four tales and, above all, by a fully re-engraved, reversed and augmented cycle after De Hooghe: one of the most distinctive forms taken by the illustration of La Fontaine at the close of the seventeenth century.