| Dom Guillaume Coutans — Description historique et topographique de la grande route de Paris à Reims, avec le plan de cette dernière ville, orné d'allégories |
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Description historique et topographique de la grande route de Paris à Reims, avec le plan de cette dernière ville, orné d'allégories |
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Vente and Vignon, Paris, 1775. Small folio (244 x 168 mm). Letterpress title within engraved ornamental border, 23 unnumbered double-page engravings, including dedication leaf with allegorical scene of the royal departure for Rheims, engravings [2-22] occupying the upper half of each double-page opening with letterpress descriptive text below, no. [23] a double-page engraving of the entry of Louis XVI into Rheims, large folding engraved view-plan of Rheims within floral border with four oval pictorial cartouches including medallion portraits of Clovis and Louis XVI. (Some marginal soiling, lower margin of dedication plate shaved, small loss to text of sheet 11 from old adhesion, folding plate with repaired tear at mount and a few discreetly repaired marginal fold breaks.) Bound in 1912 for Georges Montandon by Charles de Samblanx in crimson gold-tooled morocco, sides paneled with central floral cartouche surrounding a gilt fleur-de-lys, small anchor tools at corners evoking Montandon's coat-of-arms, spine gilt with faux raised bands, turn-ins gilt, gilt edges, Samblanx's gold-stamped signature on upper turn-in; slipcase. Provenance: Georges Montandon (1879-1944), Swiss anthropologist and race theorist, his engraved armorial ex-libris printed on specially inserted flyleaf preceding title. First edition. Published in honor of Louis XVI's coronation at Rheims, "dedicated and presented to the King" Coutans' little road atlas describes and illustrates with bird's-eye views every significant locality along the route from Paris to Rheims. Coutans was a Benedictine of the celebrated Abbey of St. Maur, which makes a discreet appearance in the outskirts of Soissons on plate 15. This copy belonged to the Swiss anthropologist Georges Montandon, whose ethno-racist theories evolved into a militant anti-Semitism and active Nazi collaboration, for which he was killed by members of the Resistance on August 3, 1944. Cohen-de Ricci 262. |
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