Encyclopédie générale du calembour d'après MM. Dupin, Sauzet, Soult, Thiers, Guizot, Duchâtel, etc., pour la partie politique ; MM. Balzac, Marco Saint-Hilaire, Altaroche, Claudon, Ch. Baltard, Clavel, Victor Hugo, Bareste, etc., pour la partie littéraire ; MM. H. Herz, Tamburini, Duprez, Listz, Auber, Pilati, Musard, etc., pour la partie musicale. Recueillie et mise en désordre par Joseph Prudhomme ; et qui n'est pas ornée de 12,000 gravures

First edition.

Contemporary-style half tawny calf over marbled paper boards, smooth spine decoratively tooled in blind with double fillets and floral ornaments, bookplate mounted on pastedown, wrappers preserved, speckled edges, modern binding.

A few letters erased in the text on page 35.

Exceptionally rare collection of puns and jeux de mots based on homonymy and paronymy.

The CCFr records only a similar title, though not corresponding to ours: Encyclopédie pittoresque du calembour, printed in Paris without date and comprising 127 pages with illustrations (BnF, Institut, Grenoble), which appears to be an enlarged later edition of our work. In any case, the Moscow imprint is genuine, and our small volume constitutes one of the earliest productions issued by the partnership formed in 1843 between Woldemar Gautier (heir to a dynasty of booksellers established in Russia) and Frédéric Monighetti to acquire the printing house of Auguste Semen and continue the business of Jean Gautier. As this partnership was dissolved as early as 1845, titles bearing the two names are exceedingly scarce.

This did not mark the end of the Gautier family's activities in Moscow: in 1864, Woldemar acquired the stock of Charles Urbain's bookshop, formerly Urbain & Renaud, another prominent French bookseller in Moscow, thereby becoming the city's sole major French bookseller. See Rjéoutski (Vladislav): La Librairie française en émigration : le cas de la Russie (deuxième moitié du XVIIIe-début du XIXe siècles), in: Proceedings of the conference “La prosopographie des hommes du livre” (2005). Small vignette bearing the DG monogram mounted on the front endpapers.