Recueil de bonnes et mauvaises poisies, de diferens auteurs, anciens et modernes, bons et mauvais, ou si vous voulez, pot poury, en prose et en vers.

£25,000 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

An extraordinary survival, and a monumental record of more than one individual’s eclectic cultural and intellectual interests; a hand-bound, -stitched and -stuck French manuscript miscellany of commonplaced poetry and prose, spanning a period of more than 150 years, from the closing decades of the sixteenth century to the early years of the eighteenth. It is rare to find compendia of such scope and volume surviving in as complete and untouched condition as the present, and it offers innumerable avenues for further research. In some ways this volume aligns with the definition of a commonplace book; a collection of snippets arranged by one or multiple pairs of hands, sometimes over decades, though physically it is a departure. There is little of the cohesion, organisation or uniformity that we might associate with a commonplace book or comparable, individually-compiled manuscript genres; it is miscellaneous in both its content and physical form. Rather than a blank book into which extracts are copied, this is more scrapbook, a vessel for foreign and flyaway slips, scraps, leaves, even whole gatherings of paper to be physically attached and inserted into. The volume comprises over 400 leaves of varying sizes, ranging from the largest, folio sheets repurposed from an account book and pre-structured in printed columns, through quarto bifolia, flattened letters – which pleasingly retain their folds, and the grubbiness of once exposed outer areas (e.g. f.329) - to small slips and st

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