A French Schoolboy in Rome?
AESOP.
Les fables d’Ésope, mises en françois, avec le sens moral en quatre vers, et des figures à chaque fable. Nouvelle edition, revue, corrigée et augmentée de la vie d’Esope, dédiée a la jeunesse. Lyon, Amable Leroy, 1809.
12mo, pp. 384, [10], [2, blank]; woodcut frontispiece to half-title verso, numerous woodcut illustrations; first few quires with creased corners, closed tears to E1 and G1, repairs to title and half-title, slight toning throughout, but a good copy; uncut and partly unopened in contemporary blue wrappers lined with printed waste, paper label with manuscript lettering to spine; rather worn, with chips and cracks to spine; small oval bookseller’s ticket of Bouchard Libraire (69 Place d’Espagne, Rome) to front wrapper (see below).
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Les fables d’Ésope, mises en françois, avec le sens moral en quatre vers, et des figures à chaque fable. Nouvelle edition, revue, corrigée et augmentée de la vie d’Esope, dédiée a la jeunesse.
An illustrated Lyon schoolboy edition of Aesop’s Fables, uncut in its original wrappers with the ticket of a French bookseller in Rome.
This was a popular school edition of Aesop’s Fables. It contains a life of Aesop by Maximus Planudes, quatrains by the seventeenth-century poet Isaac de Benserade (mentioned in the avertissement; apparently these were originally designed for fountains at Versailles representing thirty-nine of the fables), and a dedication signed ‘F.M.’. Each fable begins and ends with a four-line verse, the first summarising the tale and the last explaining its moral. The frontispiece portrait of Aesop as a hunchback follows the standard iconography, and the neatly executed woodcut illustrations accompanying the fables display an attractively simple clarity.
Amable Leroy (1748–1830) had previously issued this Aesop in 1796, and numerous other imprints are recorded, as befitting a schoolbook in regular demand.
Provenance:
The Bouchard bookshop was active in Rome from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth, providing French books for the local market.
No copies traced in the UK, US, or in France. OCLC finds copies in Munich and Nijmegen only.