UNRECORDED ORLÉANS-PRINTED PRIMER
[PRIMER.]
Nouvel alphabet en français, divisé par syllabes.
Orléans, ‘Chez Berthevin, libraire’, [c. 1820].
16mo, pp. 44, likely lacking two final leaves (see below); title printed within woodcut frame with small woodcut ornament, small woodcut tailpieces; some dampstaining and dust-soiling, top- and fore-edges irregularly trimmed; in a contemporary stab-stitched binding reusing an eighteenth-century manuscript on vellum; soiled and cockled; contemporary pentrials throughout; later pencil annotations to 2 pp.
An unrecorded Orléans-printed devotional primer, including litanies to the Christ Child (with vertically-printed refrains) and the duties of children toward their parents.
Such primers, containing the alphabet, two- and three-letter monosyllables, and a series of prayers for Mass, appeared throughout nineteenth-century France. Also present here are the ‘devoirs des enfants envers leurs meres & peres’, including supporting one’s parents in poverty and promptly carrying out their last wishes, and a series of ‘Litanies de l’enfance de Jesus-Christ’, with the refrains ‘Nous vous adorons’ and ‘Exaucez-nous, enfant Jesus’ printed vertically.
The Stockholm-born bookseller and publisher Jules-Julien-Gabriel Berthevin (1769–1839) was conservateur du materiel at the French Imprimerie royale under the Bourbon Restoration and seems to have published a few other moral works for children, among them Les Délassemens de l'adolescence (1802) and Alphonse et Dalinde (1797-8).
The two final leaves, likely containing a litany to the Virgin Mary, have been carefully torn out by an early owner.
We find no other copies on OCLC, Library Hub, or CCfr.
