Sapho Moeurs Parisiennes

Illustrated edition of Sapho. Mœurs parisiennes, published in Paris in 1925 by the Librairie des Amateurs, A. Ferroud - F. Ferroud, successeur. One of 25 numbered copies on Grand Japon, the first and deluxe issue. The limitation reserves for these twenty-five copies the various states of the illustrations, including a lightly tinted state and a black state, together with a large original watercolour by Auguste Leroux, here signed. The edition continued with 175 copies on Imperial Japan paper and 1,000 on Arches wove, with a further 25 copies on Dutch handmade paper numbered in Roman numerals, making a total edition of 1,225 copies.

Illustrated with a portrait of Alphonse Daudet as frontispiece, drawn by Auguste Leroux and etched by Eugène Decisy, and 46 distinct compositions by Leroux and Henri Bouché-Leclercq, coloured through stencils: a title vignette repeated on the half-title, 15 full-page plates, 15 headpieces and 15 tailpieces. The additional states are bound at the end of the volume. Some catalogues give a higher total by counting the illustrations differently, but the collation of 46 distinct compositions is also that adopted by ALDE.

Contemporary full navy blue morocco by René Kieffer, signed on the doublure. Spine with five raised bands, decorated with gilt rolls, dotted tooling and a large antique-inspired octagonal tool repeated twice; a large floral octagonal tool at the centre of each board, with related pentagonal tools at the corners. Navy blue morocco doublures framed with dotted and octagonal gilt tools, marbled endpapers, original wrappers and spine preserved, blind fillet to board edges, hatched headcaps, top edge gilt with deckle edges preserved.

Five leaves, including the lower wrapper, have been cut at the upper corner, probably to facilitate access to the additional suites. An attractive copy.

Kieffer's binding is particularly appropriate to the date of the edition. Trained at the École Estienne, first as a gilder and later active as both binder and publisher, he belonged to the generation that transformed French binding in the early twentieth century. During the 1920s his decorative vocabulary moved increasingly away from the floral language inherited from Marius Michel towards more geometric forms, clearly visible here in the interplay of octagonal and pentagonal tools. Kieffer himself argued that the decoration of a binding should be conceived for the particular text it enclosed rather than drawn from a repertory applied indiscriminately to any book.

The binding encloses an edition equally characteristic of interwar French bibliophily: the livre d'illustrateur, printed on fine papers, issued with multiple states of the illustrations, and reserving unique material for the earliest copies. Such productions had long been a speciality of the Librairie des Amateurs, founded by André Ferroud in 1878 and taken over in 1903 by his nephew François, whose name still appears on the title-page in the form "A. Ferroud - F. Ferroud, successeur".

The novel itself was already forty years old. First published by Charpentier in 1884, Sapho belongs to Daudet's Parisian fiction and draws substantially upon his youthful relationship with Marie Rieu in the story of Jean Gaussin and Fanny Legrand. Its dedication, « À mes fils, quand ils auront vingt ans » [To my sons, when they are twenty], makes explicit the moral purpose Daudet gave to this highly personal material: an account, cast as fiction for his sons, of the attractions and wounds of a youth he had himself experienced.

Forty years later, Leroux and Bouché-Leclercq illustrated a Paris that had already become that of an earlier generation. Leroux, winner of the Grand Prix de Rome for painting in 1894 and a resident at the Villa Medici from 1895 to 1898, had long divided his career between painting and book illustration; Bouché-Leclercq, himself a painter, also served as curator of the Musée Jacquemart-André. Their contribution extends well beyond the fifteen full-page plates: the headpieces, tailpieces and title vignette carry the illustration through the entire rhythm of the volume.

In the ordinary copies these compositions necessarily remain reproduced images. Here, the suites allow the different stages of their printing to be followed, while Leroux's large signed watercolour restores to the volume an original work by the artist behind the printed edition.

A fine copy from the deluxe issue, limited to 25 copies on Grand Japon, comprising the various states of the illustrations, a large original signed watercolour by Auguste Leroux, and a handsome contemporary full morocco binding by René Kieffer, with the original wrappers preserved.