Fables et Poésies Choisies de Théophile-Conrad Pfeffel
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Authors
Pfeffel, Gottlieb Konrad
Issue Date
1840
Type
Book, Whole
Language
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Abstract
Bodemann #297.1 calls this a first edition and offers a black-and-white reproduction of the colorful title-page. This was a fortunate find on a Sunday morning at the Brassens book market that I had once visited but long since forgotten. And this visit happened just before I took a train ride through Pfeffel's old territory and worked on some of his poetry to use in the videotaped lectures I was preparing that summer. This is a substantial book on heavy paper, providing not only French verse translations of Pfeffel's fables and other works but also a black-and-white portrait frontispiece; an opulently colored title-page that features a doubting Thomas at the top and at the bottom a crocodile facing a lizard (see I:XXX); a colored initial on the biographical notice on Pfeffel, along with a black-and-white illustration of his home at its end; chromolithographed title-pages for each of the four books of fables; and one full-page black-and-white fable illustration per book. These include La Pipe Turque (55); Les Bonzes (153); Thémire et le Serpent (233); and Le Pommier (343). The wildest of the title-pages is for Book III. It features a native and an eagle in glorious colors (200). My two favorite fables from Pfeffel so far are The Bee and the Butterfly and The Ass and the Cart, but unfortunately I could not find either here. There seem to be just over forty fables in each book, specifically 43, 43, 44, and 41 as they are numbered here. After the closing AI, there is an eight-page list of subscribers arranged by cities.
Description
Citation
Publisher
C. Silbermann et L. Derivaux
G. Silbermann et L. Dervaux
G. Silbermann et L. Dervaux