The date of this volume shown on the title page is "AN IX", apparently referring to the 'French Revolutionary calendar' created and implemented during the French Revolution and used by the French government for about 12 years from late 1793 to 1805. The year "X" or "An X" (Year 10) of the French Republican Calendar corresponds to September 23, 1801 – September 22, 1802.
These volumes cover what was known of the "natural sciences" at the time, including what would now be called material science, physics, chemistry and technology as well as the natural history of animals.
This epic, historically seminal work is the one Comte de Buffon is most famous for. It had various editions. This version is apparently very rare.
The Author:
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707 – 1788) was a French naturalist, mathematician, and cosmologist. He held the position of intendant (director) at the Jardin du Roi, now called the Jardin des plantes.
Buffon's works influenced the next two generations of naturalists, including two prominent French scientists Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Georges Cuvier. Buffon published thirty-six quarto volumes of his Histoire Naturelle during his lifetime, with additional volumes based on his notes and further research being published in the two decades following his death.
Charles-Nicolas-Sigisbert Sonnini de Manoncourt (1751 – 1812) was a French naturalist. Between 1799 and 1808, Sonnini de Manoncourt wrote 127 volumes of the Histoire naturelle. Noteworthy among these, especially for herpetologists, is Histoire naturelle des Reptiles, avec figures desinées d'après nature, in four volumes, which he wrote with Pierre André Latreille. This work includes descriptions and illustrations of many North American reptiles.
The Artist:
Pierre Denys de Montfort, also spelt Pierre Dénys de Montfort, (1766–1820) was a French naturalist, in particular a malacologist, remembered today for his pioneering inquiries into the existence of the gigantic octopuses. He was inspired by a description from 1783 of an eight-metre long tentacle found in the mouth of a sperm whale.
Montfort was author of Conchyliologie systématique, et classification méthodique de coquilles (2 vols., Paris 1808–1810)[1] and of Histoire Naturelle Générale et Particulière des Mollusques (2 vols., Paris 1801–1802) published as an addendum to the comte de Buffon's Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière.
He appears also to have been the author of Petit vocabulaire à l'usage des Français et des Alliés, renfermant les noms d'une partie des choses les plus essentielles à la vie en plusieurs langues: français, Latin, hébreu, hollandais, allemand, anglais, espagnol, italien, etc par M. Denys de Montfort,[2] which appeared in 1815, as Paris filled with the polyglot armies of the Allies, after the fall of Napoleon in 1814.
Montfort later advanced more sensational claims. He proposed that ten British warships that had mysteriously disappeared one night in 1782 must have been attacked and sunk by giant octopuses. The British knew what had happened to the ships, resulting in a disgraceful revelation for Montfort. His career never recovered and he died starving and poor in Paris around 1820.[3] Many of his sources for the "kraken octopus" probably described the very real giant squid, Architeuthis, proven to exist in 1857.
The Plates & Technique:
Line-engraving or Copperplate engraving is a highly exacting & labor-intensive process for intaglio printmaking.
The original drawing is cut into the surface of a copper or steel plate with a hand-held sharp steel point or burin, with shading created by many fine cut lines, or hatching. Before printing takes place, the plate is heated, covered with ink. The warm ink seeps into the finest of depressions and fills the lines and textures of the drawing. The rest of the plate is cleaned off. The copper plate is now pressed with a printing press on to moistened paper which soaks up the ink from the depressions in the plate. The copperplate-engraving technique is very exacting, time-consuming and exhausting for the engraver, who needs a lot of strength for it.
Every part of these prints was made by hand: Hand drawn & engraved on Copper or steel which was hand-mined, smelted & rolled, printed onto handmade cotton rag paper, inked & colored with hand-ground pigments individually by hand, & they were usually hand sewn into handmade leather-bound books.
Condition:
Appears to be virtually untouched condition. Opening this volume felt like I was one of the very first people to ever have turned its pages. In fact some of the pages remain folded at top, awaiting the bookbinder to properly cut & trim. It appears to be in superb shape. The pages are crisp, the engravings about as perfect as I've seen. The temporary covers are worn, being of paper, & not intended to be shelved for long.
These prints & volumes are very old & may have minor imperfections expected with age, such as some typical age-toning of the paper, oxidation of the old original watercolors, spots, text-offsetting, artifacts from having been bound into a book, etc. Please examine the photos & details carefully.
Size: 9 x 6 inches approximately.
Text Page(s):
This one comes with all the original text pages. Appears to be Buffon's essay in old French, beautifully hand typeset. Includes frontispiece & title page.
Combined Shipping:
Yes! Multiple items can be combine into one package for a single shipping cost. eBay should auto-combine your items if you put all of your selections into your shopping cart & check out all together as one order. If you purchase them individually, eBay charges shipping on each, which I then will refund after.
If you're assessed multiple shipping charges for one combined package, I will endeavor to refund any overage asap.
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Please note: The information I've included in this listing is based on my best research. I'm a layperson enthusiast of these works not a professional historian of antiquarian books & prints, but I do try my best to research reasonably accurate information readily available to me. Any corrections or further information you might offer would certainly appreciated! The scans in the images are my best efforts to accurately show the item. Antique prints & old paper are notoriously tricky to scan accurately. In my experience, scanners tend to be thrown off by the off-whites & gradations in age-toned paper. If the scanner produces a scan that's too dark or too brown, etc, I'll often try to reasonably color-correct to represent the print as accurately as possible. I'm not a professional in color-correcting images yet I try my best to show the print as close to the original as possible. I also find that different monitors show colors differently, & eBay's system can sometimes throw off the colors a bit in the uploaded JPEG images as they appear on their site. I do take great pains to make these listings as professional as possible. Thank you!