Fables de La Fontaine, Tome Premier
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Authors
David, Jules
de La Fontaine, Jean
Walckenaer, C.A.
Issue Date
1839
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Issue
Type
Book, Whole
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Abstract
This is one of my favorite acquisitions for the collection. It seems to reproduce the 1842 edition (Bassy #42, p. 268) in many respects, except that it is published by Armand Aubrée, publisher of the 1839 edition. Further, it has the title-page information of that 1839 edition, and the special frontispiece to the second volume includes a date of 1839. Its features from the 1842 Aubert edition include 1) the sensitive frontispiece of La Fontaine with poésie and morale at his sides; 2) the wonderful David illustrations (Bassy a), including a head-piece (about 3 by 2) for each fable and a smaller tail-piece for many ; 3) the twelve frontispieces (signed by Schaal and Laisné), one at the beginning of each book, each of which incorporates motifs from several fables in that book into a beautiful emblem (Bassy b); and six plates outside the text in each volume designed by such as Johannot, Grenier, and Lange and often engraved by Thompson (Bassy c). These added plates are not at the page numbers given by Bassy, but rather at the exact point in the book where they further illustrate their given fables. There is also another frontispiece added to each volume, complete with gold and coloring, and well described by Bassy, but they are exchanged here, with the musical shepherd and Perrin Dandin in the second volume and FG and the countryman with the serpent in the first volume. However, my volume seems to have them where they belong, since the latter two fables are Books I and VI, respectively! These two lovely volumes in leather with gilt page-edges all around were found on a day of hooky from the Leeds conference at one of the nicest used book stores I have been in. Among my favorite illustrations are: OF (61); the bald man between the two women he is courting (93); CJ (99); the highly balanced and intricate frontispiece to Book II, with the falling astronomer at its center; the tail-piece to BF, showing an academic copying things out of many books (216); the grisly tail-piece to The Mother, the Child, and the Wolf (233); the full-page plate of the two servants ready to kill the rooster (facing 261); and The Eagle and the Owl (281). How should we understand the human figures set into the full-page plate for TH (facing 309)? There are inscriptions on the first pages from 9.1.24 and March, '44. The only watermark I can find in the first fifty pages of either volume is a mark (D?) in the lower right corner of the added frontispiece of the first volume. Now that I have a second copy, perhaps of the 1838 and 1839 original printing (Bodemann 287.1), I note that this volume is very close to Bodemann's #287.3, published by Aubrée about 1840. Until I am certain, I will stay with the original date I have already assigned of 1839, which is found, by the way, on the added title-page that perhaps should have been inserted into Volume I rather than into Volume II!
Description
Citation
Publisher
Armand Aubrée, Éditeur
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DOI
Identifier
3102 (Access ID)