DU FAIL, Noël.

£3,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Baliverneries ou Contes nouveaux d'Eutrapel, autrement dit Leon Ladulfi. First Chiswick Press edition, one of 100 copies, this copy in a charming pastiche Duodo binding. The intricate design of leafy ovals and flowers pays homage to the Parisian bindings made for Pietro Duodo (1554-1611), the Venetian ambassador to France from 1594 to 1597. The gilt foil endpapers are a lavish addition to the style and a generally uncommon feature.Duodo's library was uniformly bound in fanfare style, each binding colour-coded by subject: literature works in olive morocco (as here), theology, philosophy, and history in red, and medical titles in citron. Unexpectedly recalled to Venice in 1597, Duodo left the books in Paris, where they remained untouched until rediscovered during the French Revolution. The collection was brought to England and dispersed; Charles Lewis was the first British binder to produce imitations to meet the demand for Duodo's charming style. This is the only known example by Charles Smith, likely the London bookbinder Samuel Charles Smith active between 1813 and around 1828.Baliverneries is a collection of rustic tales in Rabelais's style published in 1548, describing country life in Renaissance Brittany through the adventures of the impertinent protagonist Eutrapel. Provenance: offered by Maggs, Bookbinding in the British Isles, cat. 1212, vol. II, no. 214 - Stephen C. Massey.

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