Aesop in Caen
AESOP.
Les fables et la vie d’Ésope, composée par Planudes le Grand, traduites du Grec en Français, selon la version Grecque, avec le sens moral. Caen, Pierre-Théodore Chalopin, [between 1822 and 1832].
8vo, pp. 79, [1, blank]; woodcut vignette to title, woodcut portrait of Aesop to verso of title, numerous woodcut illustrations, of which the last signed ‘Godard Grav. à Alençon’; small area of worming through most of volume with loss of a few characters, otherwise a very good copy; stab-stitched in its original blue wrappers.
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Les fables et la vie d’Ésope, composée par Planudes le Grand, traduites du Grec en Français, selon la version Grecque, avec le sens moral.
An uncommon provincial edition of Aesop’s Fables, illustrated by Pierre-François Godard, stab-stitched in its original Bibliothèque-bleue wrappers.
The printer, Pierre-Théodore Chalopin, was the last of a printing dynasty long active in Caen. Established in the mid-seventeenth century, it became the most significant publishing house in Caen by the later eighteenth century, only ceasing with the early death of Pierre-Théodore at the age of thirty-two in 1832. The Chalopin specialised in almanacks, devotional works, and schoolbooks, from 1788 expanding into chapbooks, often known as la Bibliothèque bleue from their characteristic blue wrappers.
The lively illustrations by Godard (1768–1838) were originally devised for a Paris edition of 1798, loosely deriving from Bernard Salomon’s sixteenth-century woodcuts in Lyon and Paris editions of Aesop’s life and fables, and used for several editions by the Chalopin press.
OCLC records only two copies in the US (Columbia, Newberry); no copies traced in the UK.
Le Roc’h-Morgère, ‘La politique éditoriale des Chalopin, des livres d’école à la «Bibliothèque bleue»’, Annales de Normandie (2021), pp. 79–103.