Nouvelles récréations physiques et mathématiques

Paris, Gueffier, 1769-1770. Four octavo volumes.

First edition of this major eighteenth-century classic of scientific recreations, illustrated with 72 folding plates, 68 of them finely coloured by hand at the time of publication, together with a folding table. Four further plates listing the prices of recreational apparatus sold by Guyot accompany the first three volumes. The first two volumes appeared in 1769 and the remaining two in 1770.

Contemporary full polished tan calf, smooth spines elegantly decorated with gilt floral tools and fillets, red morocco lettering-pieces, green morocco numbering-pieces, boards framed with a gilt triple fillet.

Upper joint of volume I abraded, with a small hole and a split at the foot; lower joint of volume II narrowly split at the foot; headcap of volume IV worn and tailcap partly worn; tip of one corner exposed; some rubbing. Three small holes in the half-title of volume II. Faint dampmark in the corner of page 241 in volume I. Despite these signs of use, an attractive set, internally fresh and printed on fine white paper, in bindings of quality.

With their delicate contemporary colouring, the plates turn the work into a cabinet of experimental physics unfolded upon the page. Magnets, mirrors, lanterns, hydraulic devices, card tricks, concealed mechanisms and electrical apparatus are dismantled piece by piece. The colour serves more than a decorative purpose: it distinguishes the components of the machines, clarifies their construction and guides the reader wishing to reproduce the experiments.

The price lists extend this practical purpose. Guyot does not merely explain the instruments required for his recreations: he offers them for sale. The book therefore becomes a treatise, a construction manual and a commercial catalogue, inviting the reader to carry the experiment from the page into the drawing room, and from the drawing room onto the stage.

A clerk at the Paris postal administration and a member of the Société littéraire et militaire de Besançon, Edme-Gilles Guyot published the Nouvelles récréations physiques et mathématiques as an acknowledged continuation of the works of Jacques Ozanam. He retained their taste for riddles, numbers and feats of dexterity, while incorporating more recent discoveries concerning magnetism, electricity, air, optics and chemistry. The resulting combination gives the collection its distinctive character: science is never separated from the pleasure of astonishment.

Each experiment follows the same movement. Guyot first produces an effect that appears to contradict the natural order: an object moves without visible contact, a figure emerges from the light, or a playing card obeys an unseen will. He then reveals the principle, describes the apparatus, supplies its measurements and makes reproducible what, only a few pages earlier, still appeared miraculous. Explanation does not destroy the marvellous; it transfers it to the ingenuity of the mechanism.

This method places the work at the meeting point of experimental physics and conjuring. By publishing the methods of recreational physicists, Guyot brought into print effects that public demonstrators such as Nicolas-Philippe Ledru, known as Comus, and François Pelletier preferred to reserve for their public and private performances. The exposure of the secret threatened the authority of the showman, while simultaneously allowing amateurs to become experimenters themselves.

Among the optical devices are methods for making figures appear within smoke. These unsupported floating images anticipate effects that the phantasmagorists of the late eighteenth century would develop into a new form of theatre. Guyot did not single-handedly invent phantasmagoria, but his work transmitted several of the techniques through which the magic lantern would soon summon the dead, spectres and apparitions before audiences seated in darkness.

Such disclosures did not go unanswered. In 1769 Charles Rabiqueau published his Letter and Subscription Regrets of a Young Provincial Woman to One of Her Friends in Paris, a satire directed against the book and its author's promises. The immediate reaction is evidence less of failure than of impact: the Recreations had made public a field in which commercial interests, professional secrets, fashionable science and rivalry among manufacturers of wonders were inseparably combined.

The undertaking was expressly intended for a society fascinated by science and spectacle. Guyot dedicated the work to the Countess of Lamberg, stating that he had devised the recreations for her amusement. Research into the genesis of the book has also emphasised the role of Count Maximilian Joseph von Lamberg and the cabinet of physics formed around the couple. Several of the instruments described appear to have been made for the Countess, making the publication the printed culmination of experiments first devised for an aristocratic circle.

The work is not confined to machines and illusions. Its recreations involving numbers, anagrams, permutations and card arrangements also belong to the history of mathematics. Certain combinatorial procedures described by Guyot later attracted the attention of Gaspard Monge and Joseph-Diez Gergonne, who subjected tricks previously presented as simple entertainments to mathematical analysis.

The success of the Nouvelles récréations was both immediate and enduring. Translated and adapted abroad, and repeatedly reissued in France, the book helped transform natural magic into recreational physics, and recreational physics into the modern art of illusion. The machine replaces the miracle, yet preserves its power to astonish.

A handsome copy of the first edition, complete in four volumes with its extensive folding illustration, almost entirely coloured by hand at the time. Beneath the agreeable appearance of an Enlightenment cabinet of science, Guyot codified the mechanisms of a new art: that of producing a wonder and then revealing its secret without ever entirely dispelling the astonishment.