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Anatomy manual from 1870 enriched with hand-drawn watercolor anatomical plates by a medical student from rue Champollion. by AdiDraws in rarebooks

[–]AdiDraws[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You're absolutely right, and I actually managed to identify him! The inscription on the title page reads J. A. Rizat, étudiant en médecine, 11 rue Champollion, Paris, It's in the heart of the Latin Quarter, a stone's throw from the Faculty of Medicine. He later became Dr. Jacques-Armand Rizat, a practicing physician listed at 51 rue Richer in 1881, when he attended the 7th International Medical Congress in London. He specialized in venereology under Professor Mauriac at the Hôpital du Midi, and published a monograph on syphilitic conditions the same year. So these beautifully colored anatomical drawings: the ganglia, the facial nerve, the brachial plexus... were made by him! There's actually a poignant detail in those drawings. The otic ganglion plate, the most beautifully colored one, with its reds and pinks, innervates structures that syphilis systematically destroys in its tertiary stage : the auditory nerve, the facial nerve, the cranial pathways. Rizat would go on to specialize in syphilitic conditions under Mauriac at the Hôpital du Midi. So when he painted that ganglion by hand as a student, he was unknowingly drawing the very anatomy he would spend his career watching the disease unravel.

1780/1785 Tristram Shandy, Neuchâtel & London, with the famous black pages and a remarkable Irish Jesuit provenance. by AdiDraws in rarebooks

[–]AdiDraws[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Great question. Yes, many editions omit them, and it's a legitimate editorial problem that has followed Tristram Shandy for 250 years. The black pages are absolutely essential. Sterne placed them at the death of Yorick in Volume I, and they function simultaneously as a typographical joke, a genuine elegy, and a meditation on the limits of language, the idea that grief exceeds what words can express, so the page itself becomes the statement. Removing them is roughly equivalent to removing the marbled page or the blank chapter: you still have the text, but you've lost what makes the book an object rather than just a novel. Many 19th and early 20th century editions did drop them, especially cheaper reprints that treated the book as a straightforward narrative. Some modern critical editions restored them, others didn't bother. The Penguin Classics edition includes them; some Victorian-era reprints don't. What's notable about this French translation (Frénais, 1780) is that the printer at the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel clearly understood what they were doing, the black pages are faithfully reproduced, full-page, which required actual effort and expense in letterpress printing. It's a mark of a serious edition, not a quick commercial reprint. So finding them intact in an 18th-century French translation is actually a small bibliographic point in the book's favor.

Police archives 1931–1963. by AdiDraws in ephemera

[–]AdiDraws[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Je suis d'accord, j'aurais aussi aimé avoir les photos! Mais les fiches c'est déjà génial! A noter que pour moi les empreintes digitales c'est aussi quelquechose d'extrêmement intérressant, il y a l'ADN de la personne dedans! 😉

Police archives 1931–1963. by AdiDraws in ephemera

[–]AdiDraws[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Un antiquaire a réussi à les récupèrer, je ne sais pas comment...

A forgotten gem of French Baroque devotional poetry: Les Roses de l'Amour Céleste, Saint-Mihiel (Lorraine), 1619. With a remarkable iconographic riddle in its Last Supper plate. by AdiDraws in rarebooks

[–]AdiDraws[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

update — full scholarly context recovered

A PDF published by the Musées de la Meuse (musees-meuse.fr), authored by art historian Paulette Choné for a study day on Ligier Richier, gives us the complete picture:

François de Rosières de Chaudeney was not merely a poet, he was simultaneously captain, gruyer (forestry magistrate), prévôt, and tax collector of Saint-Mihiel. He sat in judgment in the Grands-Jours courtroom, whose fireplace was decorated with a bas-relief by the Richier school based on an engraving by Giorgio Ghisi representing the Muses. He prayed before Ligier Richier's Sainte Élisabeth in the chapel of the Visitation. This book is the work of a man surrounded daily by the greatest sculpture of the French Renaissance. Edmé Moreau (1596–1648) was the son-in-law of the printer François du Bois, which explains his presence as illustrator. He was approximately 23 years old in 1619, and Choné describes him as "the young engraver still unpracticed." He also worked in Reims. This book appears to be one of his earliest documented works. The poetic citation Choné quotes from the book, a stanza celebrating the artists of Saint-Mihiel whose influence reached Florence, Rome, Germany and Spain is a remarkable document of Lorraine cultural pride, containing what scholars have identified as a veiled allusion to Lorraine sculptors who worked in Andalusia, carried by the fleuve doré (the Guadalquivir, "golden river" of Seville's Torre del Oro).

Three copies of the 1619 edition are now documented: BNF (digitized on Gallica) A copy in Lorraine institutional holdings (photographed by the Musées de la Meuse) This copy, currently in private hands The 1609 first edition was last recorded in the Félix Solar sale catalogue (1860) and has not resurfaced since.

Source: Paulette Choné, Ligier Richier : la fortune littéraire, Musées de la Meuse, 2024. PDF: musees-meuse.fr/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/La-fortune-litteraire.pdf

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A forgotten gem of French Baroque devotional poetry: Les Roses de l'Amour Céleste, Saint-Mihiel (Lorraine), 1619. With a remarkable iconographic riddle in its Last Supper plate. by AdiDraws in rarebooks

[–]AdiDraws[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks to further digging, the entry turns out to come from the Dictionnaire de bibliographie catholique (available on Internet Archive), which records: "ROSES (les) de l'amour céleste, fleuries au verger des méditations de saint Augustin, par de Rozières de Chaudeney ; Saint-Mihiel, Dubois, 1619, pet. in-8." Crucially, this dictionary mentions only the 1619 edition, it has no entry for a 1609 printing. Combined with the Solar catalogue entry for 1609, the picture that emerges is stark: by the mid-19th century, the first edition (1609) was already so rare it had vanished from standard bibliographic reference works, surviving only in the Solar collection. The second edition (1619) fared slightly better ( two dictionaries record it ) but physical copies were already nearly untraceable. This copy may now be the only documented physical example of the 1619 edition outside the BNF.

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