Information
RARE MINIATURE ALMANAC IN GOLD & SILVER-EMBROIDERED BINDING
INCORPORATING ORIGINAL WATERCOLOUR PAINTINGS
[ALMANAC - FRENCH]. Étrennes Mignones, Curieuses et Utiles, avec plusieurs augmentatons & corrections, pour l'année mil sept cent soixante-dix.
Paris, Pierre-François Durand (printed by Chardon), 1770 [= 1769?]. 32mo (9 x 5.5 cm; binding 9.4 x 6.0 cm). With 2 folding engraved maps (each 8 x 9 cm) of France and of the area around Paris, and a decoration built-up from fleurons on the title-page. With historical texts about the countries of Europe and a wide variety of other information. With the twentieth-century morocco bookplate of Dominique Goytino. Contemporary binding richly embroidered in silver and gold thread, incorporating 2 original watercolour paintings, each in a painted gold frame in the centre of the front and back boards, gilt edges, pink silk paste-downs. Preserved in a modern black half-morocco box with marbled sides and lining.
| Orders and Information | € 1875 |
Third known copy of a lovely little Paris almanac with two folding maps, in a contemporary binding richly embroidered in gold and silver thread, with two original watercolour paintings, one in the central compartment of each board. The maps, "France Ecclesiastique" and "Environs de Paris," are printed on a single piece of paper (probably from a single plate) bound in so that the map of France folds out facing the title-page and the other facing the last page. The almanac has the calendar on twelve double-page spreads, with names of the saints for each day and extensive astronomical data (times for rising and setting of the sun and moon, etc.), followed by a twenty-nine page "Idée des États, Royaumes & Républiques de l'Europe, avec les naissances des princes & princesses" as well as lists of archbishoprics and bishoprics of France with their populations, the governors of the French provinces, military officials, noblemen, university officials, libraries, curiosities and events (mostly from the year 1768), information on medicines, and a five-page "Chronologie des Choses Remarquables" covering 1768/69. The almanac leaves are signed as five quires of eight leaves (A-E), but imposed to be nested inside one another (from A on the outside to E in the centre) to form a single quire of forty leaves (1 1/4 sheets of 32mo, with the watermarks divided over the lower outside corners of leaves 5 and 6 in some of the eight-leaf "quires"). We have located only one other copy, at the Bibliothèque Universitaire de l'Arsenal in Toulouse; a third copy (bound in green morocco) cannot now be located.
The binding is so extensively embroidered with gold and silver thread that one can see only at the board edges that it is actually embroidered on white silk. On each board the embroidery forms an irregular frame. In each frame a piece of paper cut to fit it contains a watercolour painting, with a scene in several colours showing classical figures, topped by a smaller scene of figures in shades of blue, the whole surrounded by a painted gold frame.
Miniature almanacs with the title Étrennes Mignon(n)es are reported for various publishers in the years 1716 to 1845. The basic form followed by the present example may have been established by 1728, and certainly by 1740, when Estienne Neaulme published a 32mo almanac (93 mm tall) with four (rather than five) nested quires of eight (A-D, a single sheet of 32mo). King Louis XV granted the Durand family a privilege for these almanacs, probably for fifteen years beginning with the almanac for 1752 (the present almanac records the widow Durand's new fifteen-year privilege, granted in 1766, to take effect when the old one expired).
Book and binding in very good condition. An extremely rare miniature almanac in a contemporary richly gold and silver-embroidered binding incorporating two original watercolour paintings.
