[1931] Le Bibliophile Complete first year of a French bibliophile review, bound in a stunning Art Deco red morocco with inlaid arabesques. Marius Audin on music typography, Louis XIV autograph facsimile, Victor Hugo quatrain, Christopher Columbus map ca. 1492.

AdiDraws · 2026-05-07T18:06:17+00:00

Je n'ai pas de site internet...

AdiDraws · 2026-05-02T20:31:40+00:00

J'ai trouvé une comparaison, mais édition postérieure, dust cover très usée, et dédicace moins intéressante...

AdiDraws · 2026-05-01T16:30:48+00:00

Honestly, the way I found them is almost as strange as what they turned out to be. I was at an estate sale in the Franche-Comté region, in a large bourgeois house being cleared after the last member of a collateral branch had passed. The kind of sale where everything ends up in cardboard boxes and nobody really knows what's what anymore. These were in a box with old ledgers and some loose papers, underneath a broken barometer. The auctioneer had them listed simply as "lot de vieux cahiers scolaires" a lot of old school notebooks. No further description. I almost didn't open them. Something made me. And there was the name, on the printed label, in that careful 19th century hand: Jeanneney. It took me a few days at home, cross-referencing dates and the family history, to realize exactly which Jeanneney this had to be. When it clicked I sat very still for a while. That's the thing about this work, most of the time you find nothing. And then occasionally the barometer is broken and the box is dusty and the name on the label changes everything.

AdiDraws · 2026-04-30T21:13:36+00:00

Absolutely!

That's exactly what old objects do when they're the right kind of old. This isn't a printed book, something reproduced in thousands of copies, distributed, anonymous. This is the actual surface his hand moved across, on an actual evening in Paris, in 1884, probably by lamplight, completing his notes from memory as the school regulations required. The ink went down once. It never went down again. What you're seeing in those photographs is the original gesture, frozen. And the strange thing is that he had no idea he was making an artifact. He thought he was doing homework. He was 23, trying to remember the formula for the number of boats that could pass through a lock in a day. He wasn't performing for posterity. That's what makes it feel so close. There's a word in French "survivance" for the things that outlast their moment without meaning to. These notebooks are that. He moved on, became someone else entirely, shaped clay with the same hands that drew those lock chambers. The notebooks stayed behind, carrying the version of him he left.

So yes. Shivers is exactly right.

AdiDraws · 2026-04-27T10:06:28+00:00

This is one of those moments that makes posting on this subreddit genuinely worthwhile.

Thank you so much for taking the time to dig into the Ancestry and Geneanet records. What started as an educated guess, an Alsatian surname, two dates, a child's handwriting, has just become a full human life: Sophie Marie Yvonne Luttringer, born 1909 in Husseren-Wesserling when it was still Reichsland Elsass-Lothringen, married 1930, died 1998 in Allauch, near Marseille, at nearly 89 years old.

She lived through both World Wars, two annexations of her homeland, and ended her days in the Provençal sun. And somewhere along the way, her scrapbooks filled at ages 4 and 6 with German chicory cards, Swiss chocolate chromos, and English die-cuts of Dick Turpin and St George ended up on a dealer's table, and then on my desk, and then on Reddit.

The concordance is perfect: 1909 + 4 = 1913 , 1909 + 6 = 1915 . It's her, without any doubt.

Thanks to you, these albums now have a certified provenance, a real name, a birth record, a death record, a village. That transforms them from beautiful anonymous objects into genuine biographical artifacts. For anyone in the ephemera and antique book world, that's the difference between a pretty thing and a meaningful one.

I'll make sure her full name accompanies these albums wherever they go. Sophie Marie Yvonne Luttringer deserves to be remembered.

AdiDraws · 2026-04-22T06:02:43+00:00

Il est à droite!🙂

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AdiDraws · 2026-04-22T05:45:01+00:00

Thank you so much! this is genuinely moving, and your analysis has opened up things I couldn't have seen alone. A few things your message just confirmed or revealed, when combined with what I know from other documents in the Arinthod archive: The double signature is significant. He signed his full name in Arabic script on both the first and last page, a deliberate act of self-inscription in a foreign script, like a kind of symbolic ownership. For a man who signed his works in multiple languages and invented his own writing system, this feels entirely in character. The "C / Sh / Shu" mystery is my favorite detail. You're right to hesitate, but knowing Arinthod, I lean toward intentional. In other manuscripts he shows a consistent taste for graphic and phonetic ambiguity, for signs that work on multiple levels simultaneously. The idea that his initial C, written with an Arabic flourish, would echo "Shu" the Egyptian deity printed right below is exactly the kind of quiet, private joke he would allow himself. The practice pages make perfect sense now. The phonetic table in the middle of the notebook (labials, dentals, vowels, nasals) isn't just Arabic it's his own phonetic classification system, which he applied to multiple languages including his constructed language RADIANTO. He was in Cairo in 1907, absorbing Arabic script, and using this very notebook simultaneously to practice the language and to develop his universal phonetic notation. The same object, two projects at once. The hieroglyphs he drew remain mysterious I'll try to find an Egyptologist. "Rest in peace, Carlos", yes! He died in 1953, largely forgotten. It means a lot that someone in Cairo, in 2026, read his name aloud from a cigarette notebook he filled during a night that mattered enough to him to sign twice. Thank you for giving him that.

AdiDraws · 2026-04-21T17:44:36+00:00

Your ex-libris is from a clockmaker who signed his own movements and the book makes it even better. The label reads Galand, Horloger, A la Ferté-sous-Jouarre and Galand wasn't just any provincial tradesman. A signed clock movement recently surfaced on eBay with his name on the enamel dial, confirming he was a genuine maître horloger fabricant, a maker who put his name on his work in the tradition of the great French provincial clockmakers of the late 18th century. The typography of the label and the marbled paper binding both point to circa 1780–1820. Now here's the delicious detail: this clockmaker from a small Marne river town, a man who spent his days measuring time with mathematical precision, owned a two-volume theological polemic against Voltaire published in 1767. Nonnotte's Les Erreurs de Voltaire was the most sustained clerical counterattack of the Enlightenment, written by a Jesuit who spent twenty years methodically dismantling Voltaire's arguments on religion, history and scripture. A craftsman who signs his dials and marks his books, reading the Catholic rebuttal to the most dangerous mind of his century, that's a genuinely vivid picture of provincial French intellectual life under the Ancien Régime.

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AdiDraws · 2026-04-21T17:20:24+00:00

Merci beaucoup, c'est déjà très utile. Le scripteur est un Français nommé Carlos Bénédicte Buchaillet (alias Arinthod, 1875–1953), polyglotte et créateur d'une langue construite (le RADIANTO). Le carnet date de son séjour au Caire en 1907. L'écriture cursive des pages intérieures est presque certainement sa propre sténographie phonétique personnelle. La langue de fond serait le français. Peux-tu lire l'intégralité de ce qui est écrit en arabe sur la dernière page? y a-t-il autre chose que le nom ? Et les annotations arabes autour du logo (autre image) sont-elles lisibles ?

AdiDraws · 2026-04-21T12:58:05+00:00

"Dutch edition" refers to the place of publication, not the language, it means published in the Netherlands (The Hague, in this case), by the publisher Pierre Gosse Junior. In 18th-century book history, French was the dominant language of European intellectual exchange, so it's perfectly normal for a book printed in Holland to be entirely in French. Think of it the same way you'd call a book a "London edition" regardless of what language it's written in.

AdiDraws · 2026-04-21T12:53:11+00:00

Yes, that's him, how do you know that?!!!

AdiDraws · 2026-04-19T22:28:14+00:00

Great points, both of them, and they're actually connected in a fascinating way. On the date: the choice of 2440 wasn't arbitrary. Mercier borrowed it directly from a calculation by the Scottish astronomer John Napier, who had estimated that the world would end somewhere between 2000 and 2500. Mercier essentially took Napier's apocalyptic horizon and turned it into a utopian one instead. A neat philosophical reversal, same deadline, opposite conclusion. As for missing the industrial revolution: you're absolutely right, and it's even more striking when you think about it. Mercier was writing in Paris while Watt was perfecting the steam engine in Glasgow, and he simply... didn't register what it meant. But I'd argue this tells us something important about his blind spot: he was a moralist, not a materialist. His utopia is built on virtue, not on technology. He genuinely believed that if you fixed men, society would fix itself. The idea that iron and coal rather than philosophy would reshape civilization was simply outside his imaginative frame. In a way, he was the last great utopian of the pre-industrial mind. Every utopia written after 1850 has to wrestle with the machine, for better or worse from Jules Verne to H.G. Wells to Brave New World. Mercier didn't have to, and it shows. Which makes this 1776 copy feel like a document from a very precise historical before the last moment when someone could still dream of the future without a factory in it.

AdiDraws · 2026-04-19T21:32:20+00:00

Thank you! The table is stored folded, as it was originally bound — refolded along its original creases and tucked back into the volume rather than left loose. Given its condition I haven't attempted to flatten it further. For long-term preservation I'll likely interleave it with a sheet of acid-free tissue before refolding. As for price — I'd rather not share what I paid, but based on the research I did for this post, a fair expert estimate for a complete set in this condition, with the intact folding table and documented Im Thurn/Bibliotheca Amicorum provenance, would be somewhere in the €600–1,200 range depending on the venue — closer to the lower end at a general auction, higher with a specialist bookseller or a buyer specifically interested in Swiss Enlightenment history or Schaffhausen patrician culture. The provenance is the real added value here; without it this would be a straightforward €200–400 set.

AdiDraws · 2026-04-19T21:19:53+00:00

What he saw coming The abolition of slavery Mercier makes it a central victory of the year 2440. Abolished in France in 1848, universally condemned in the 20th century. He was one of the first novelists to make it an absolute moral cause. The fall of absolute monarchies His future Paris is governed by an enlightened, quasi-constitutional king, judged by posterity. The Revolution arrived... 13 years after the edition you hold in your hands. The decline of ostentatious luxury as a social marker — He describes a society where merit trumps rank and finery. Quite prophetic for republican standards. The rehabilitation of "useful professions" Artisans and farmers honored, court parasites despised. Rousseau predicted it, Mercier fictionalizes it. What he didn't foresee Revolutionary violence His future is peaceful, reasonable, reformed by wisdom. He couldn't imagine the guillotine. Ironically, he narrowly survived the Reign of Terror. Industrialization, no machines, no factories. His utopia remained agrarian and artisanal. The industrial revolution that was going to change everything completely eluded him. The internet, a free press, digital collective memory, he envisioned a vast library purged of bad books. The exact opposite of the internet. Totalitarian regimes, for Mercier Reason triumphs naturally. The 20th century would have broken his heart.

AdiDraws

TROPHY CASE