Item #2711295 Album de la jeunesse…. Augustin LEGRAND.
Album de la jeunesse…

Album de la jeunesse…

Paris: Gide Fils, circa 1830.

Oblong quarto, with 60 engravings; an attractive copy in original printed boards.

With plates based on "Foreign Field Sports"

A rare and beautiful French children's book, with wonderful Australian plates including six based closely on Clark's Foreign Field Sports. This work is not recorded by Ferguson, nor by Muir; this copy belonged at one time to Paul Gavault, editor of the Gumuchian catalogue of children's books, and has his bookplate.

A rare and beautiful French children's book, with wonderful Australian plates including six based closely on Clark's Foreign Field Sports. This work is not recorded by Ferguson, nor by Muir; this copy belonged at one time to Paul Gavault, editor of the Gumuchian catalogue of children's books, and has his bookplate.

Legrand's Album was a fine production, and a relatively early one for books of this type; the chapters on natural history, whaling (with four plates), botany, ethnography, geography, and minerals, are profusely illustrated with 60 full-page engravings, including a double-hemisphere world map with geological features in the lower margin, and an astronomical chart with a pretty volvelle showing the earth orbiting the sun. Roughly a third of the plates, including six Australian scenes of Aborigines hunting and fishing, are drawn from John Heaviside Clark's Foreign Field Sports, originally published in London several years earlier, and it is evident that Clark's original descriptions were also used in translation in the accompanying letterpress.

Provenance: Paul Gavault (bookplate).

Gumuchian, 3689; not in Ferguson; not in Muir.

Condition Report: A little foxing; professionally restored at the hinges.

Price (AUD): $4,750.00

US$3,079.84   Other currencies

Ref: #2711295

Condition Report