Gand: ca. 1840, 1850. A "porcelain" trade card for the greenhouse builders Van De Cappell-De Pretter, rue de la Caverne, No. 50, Gand. The printing in gold and blue is by the Gand lithographers, G. Jacqmain. The card is illustrated with a view of a greenhouse in a gardenesque setting with fountain, house and two small human figures, all printed within a decorative Gothic-style frame. A lengthy caption informs the viewer that examples of the firm's "confection de serres en Fer" can be seen at the Verschaffelt nursery, at Van Houte's outside of Bruxelles, and in Paris at "MM les Barons Rotschild." Cartes porcelaines or "porcelain cards" were produced in the mid-nineteenth century lithography with a thin layer of white lead producing their beautiful porcelain-like effect. They were chiefly produced in Belgium between the late 1830s and the early 1860s and used as business or announcement cards. Their production was discontinued because of health hazards connected with the lead. Single sheet of glossy card stock, 10.5 x 14.2 cm., printed in colors.

(Paris: chez Basset, rue St. Jacques, no. 64, ca, 1815). "Les Jeux d'Oie" have long been a venerable form of family entertainment, education and even propaganda. This particular version, the jeu instructif des fleurs, is pretty enough to be viewed as a game for young ladies (which it probably was), but John Grand-Carteret's LES JEUX D'OIE(http://www.giochidelloca.it/dettaglio_storia.php?id=41) lists it with the "Jeu d'actualites politiques." He notes that the winning position is the crowned Lis blanc, the symbol of virtue and, of course, "Gloire Aux Lis", a sentiment in favor during the French Restoration. But there is also botanical instruction here. Along the promenade or route of the game are 63 numbered "cases" or squares, each with a handsomely engraved flower portrait, many accompanied by captions citing the flower's emblematic meaning, or one of its physical properties. Thus: marigold, "emblème de la douleur"; jasmine, "originaire de la Province"; myrtle, "dédié a Venus par les anciens"; and finally, embowered and marked with sun's rays, the lily. The rules for traversing the promenade and reaching the lily are printed in the center of the text. For example, whoever arrives at no. 42, the violet, "a flower lost in the woods," must return to no. 30, lily of the valley, and pay a sum agreed on at the outset of the game. The shape of the course or promenade is oval, thus leaving space at the corners of the sheet for charming little views of the Jardin des Tuileries seen from the terraces of the chateau, the Jardin du Luxembourg seen from the water bassins, the Jardin du Roi seen from the river bank, and a view of the labyrinth of the Jardin du Roi. Though not found in the usual library catalogues, we do find reference to a copy in the Collection of Baron de Vinck at the Bibliothèque Nationale. "Gloire aux Lis" Single sheet, 45.5 x 61 cm., engraved overall, with text in center.

Paris: Le Fuel/ Delaunay, n.d., ca. 1813. This carefully preserved juvenile geography book centers, in particular, on the city of Paris and the world that emanates from there. Thus, its four maps show, successively: the world; Europe; the French Empire and Kingdom of Italy; and metropolitan Paris. Within the text, special attention and detail is given to the descriptions of Parisian streets, bridges, street names, historic buildings and churches, and the private residences of its famous persons. For the young reader, the history and texture of Paris is placed at the center of the world. There are, of course, small sections on Spain; Portugal; Italy; Venise; Switzerland; Germany; Bavaria; Prussia;Bohemia and Moravia;Denmark; Norway; Sweden; Russian; Asia; Persia; China; Egypt; Africa; and the Artic and Antartic regions, along with many others. The engraved frontispiece shows a young boy receiving gifts and honors from the figure of L'Étude (Study). This appears to be the first and only edition; in OCLC we find only one copy at the New York Public Library. Geography for Children 32mo (10.5 x 7 cm); (vi) + engraved frontispiece + 204 pp. + 3 double-page + 1 triple page maps with outline coloring + 1 double page alphabetical table.

Paris: Université De Paris IV Sorbonne, n.d.. ( 1982). A most uncommon master’s thesis or “Memoire De Maitrise”, U.E.R. D’Historie de L’Art et D’Archéologie. The directeur de mémoire was M. le Professeur Bernard Dorival.Gilles Ragot went on to become an art historian, specialist in 20th century architecture, and author and/or co-author of several authoritative books on Le Corbusier. His 2 part, 3 volume thesis covers 21 villas designed by Le Corbusier in the region and includes a a plans of the situations of the villas in the Parisian and Boulogne su Seine regions and extensive analysis of architectural features. The work is heavily illustrated with reproductions of photographs and plans. Master’s Thesis on Le Corbusier et Pierre Jeanneret by a future authority. 3 volumes, 29.2 x 21 cm; 205 ff; with plans and photographs reproduced.l

Paris: Librarie Hachette, 1964. One of 150 copies on Velin de Rives, “Imprimé spécialement pour/ MONSIEUR ANDRE MALRAUX/Ministere D’État / Chargé Des Affaires Culturelles” signed and inscribed by the author, “Hommage de l’auteur”. Menars, located on the Loire, began in the 17th century as a classical French garden and chateau. For a brief period (1760-1764), it served as the residence residence of Madame de Pompadour, who added her personal touch to the chateau with the help of architect, Jacques-Ange Gabriel. Following her death, her brother, the marquis de Marigny, engaged Jacques-Gabriel Soufflot to further develop the site. The exuberant drawings of Anne Français fill this colorful book with impressions of visits to Menars in winter and in spring. While leading the reader through the interior and exterior spaces, she often succeeds in demonstrating their interrelationship. Accompanying text offers an overview of the history of Menars. A very charming book, printed by Mourlot and entirely designed by Français, known for inventing the concept of “ionnisme” in painting. With drawings, watercolors, text and mise en page executed entirely by the author/artist and produced in black and white and color lithograph at Mourlot, Paris. Copy printed for Andre Malraux 8vo (25.5 x 18 cm); (ii) + (xiv) + 17-66 + (10) pp. with text illustrations on every page printed in color and black and white; author’s signed presentation on the limitation page.

n.p: N.P, n.d. (ca. 1900?). A somewhat mysterious piece on art vellum having the appearance of a mailing or shipping label, but, surely being an elaborate mock-up for one or the other. “The design is signed in a monogram for “R H sc”. The sender’s address is “ Clos de la Garoupe/ Cap d’Antibes/ Alpes-Maritimes. “ in decorative black lettering. Opposite is the message:” Les Fleurs sont expédiées aussitôt qu’elles sont coupées.” Below this is an address space beginning with a decorative “M” and below, “Spécialité d’Anémones /et de la Fraises. This text is arranged in the upper diagonal space of the piece. In the lower diagonal is a splendid design of a young woman holding strawberries and surrounded by anemones. This illustration is enhanced in green, gray and rose. The Cap d’Antibes was a strong horticultural region in the 19th century. Clos de la Garoupe was once a farm ( or nursery?) before Antibes became the playground of the rich. Flowers from Cap d’Antibes. Impression 17 x 23.5 on sheet measuring 28 x 35 cm. With custom matting.

Knutsford: 1868. A wonderful picture of the rigour demanded in mid-nineteenth century local English horticultural shows. Following the list of various officers and dignitaries come the rules, followed by the various exhibition categories. For professional gardeners there are 30 classes of entry. These range from caladiums to hollyhocks, cut roses to miniature gardens for 1st and 2nd prizes (20/- the highest, being for stove or greenhouse plants in bloom.) For the amateurs, another 18 classes from ferns, foliaged geraniums, pansies, round hand bouquets to British wild plants improved for garden decoration. The highest award here for ferns, at 10/-). Classes open to all are dishes of fruits (25 varieties). The largest category with 60 classes is for Cottagers with displays ranging from best box hive of bees to the “best regulated, neatest, and most productive Cottage Garden, within three miles of Knutsford Parish Church, to be inspected twice during the season ”. This latter gets the top prize of 20/-. There is a small category for florists and nurserymen from any distance. With a two page list of subscribers, a full list of committee members, patrons and officers and two pages of very strict rules. We have not located this item in OCLC, COPAC or the Lindley Library, RHS. Stitched pamphlet, 12 mo (17 x 10.4 cm); (xii) pp. including subscribers’ list and balance sheet.

Leipzig: in de Schäferschen buchhandlung, 1803. A rare horticultural manual by Johann Heinrich Seidel, widely regarded as the "Father of Dresdener Horticulture." After completing his apprenticeship at the Großer Garten in Dresden in 1764, he embarked on a seven-year Gesellenwanderung though Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, England and France. During his travels he spent significant time at Het Loo, the Jardin des Plantes, Chiswick, and Kew while building important contacts with head gardeners throughout Europe. After returning to Dresden and taking over as court gardener, Seidel used those contacts to build one of the most important plant collections of its day, reaching 4300 species by 1806. Many of the choicest of these plants are described in the text. Seidel was one of the first German gardeners to breed camellias, but he also had a particular interest in Chinese dwarf plants and devoted an entire short chapter at the end of the book to promoting their interest. The colour frontispiece shows a Chinese gardener carrying several potted dwarf shrubs and fruit trees balanced on a pole across his shoulder. The name F. G. Leonhardi also appears on the title page, but Leonhardi was an economist and historian who wrote books on a variety of subjects. He is unlikely to have made much contribution to the horticultural content of the work. It is surprisingly rare. OCLC locates only 4 copies, of which three in Germany and one in Denmark. KVK adds one more. By Johann Heinrich Seidel, the “Father of Dresdener Horticulture” 16mo (17.2 x 10.3 cm); viii + 259 + (4) pp. + colour frontispiece and 2 engraved plates.

Bruxelles: 1849. First and apparently only edition. With an engraved frontispiece of a view taken from within the park looking towards the Palais de la Nation designed by Gilles-Barnabé Guimard who, together with Joachim Zinner, provided the overall plans for the park and Place Royal in the 18th century. The four “chants” of the poem evoke events and people in the region’s history through encounters with the park’s sculptures of classical and historical figures, its structures, etc. Of particular interest for Schoonen’s 28 pages of notes which provide detailed descriptions of the park, its plantings, layout, views and associated history. Scarce. In OCLC we locate only one copy at Utrecht and one at Vlaamse Erfgredbibliotheek. 8vo (17.2 x 12.5 cm); engraved frontispiece +92 pp with 2 tailpieces + 1 engraved plate.

Paris: Chez Pissot, 1776. First edition of the most substantial and popular original French work to advocate the natural landscape style of gardening in France. Morel never visited England, thus his ideas followed more directly from French examples (including his own gardens); nevertheless, he also drew inspiration from the published theories of Whately and Watelet and from the influence of his close association with Girardin at Ermenonville. Morel trained as an architect and geographical engineer, but his long career was focused almost entirely on garden design. He worked on at least 50 parks and gardens, including: Guiscard, Ermenonville, Casson, Launay, and La Malmaison. Extensive descriptions of Guiscard and Ermenonville are used here as examples to illustrate his ideas, although his account of Ermenonville claims more personal credit for its design than is appropriately due. But however significant Morel's activities as a creator of gardens may have been, it was as the pre-eminent theorist of natural garden design that he had the greatest impact. Of all French gardeners of the picturesque school, he stood furthest from the fashionable and decorative anglo-chinois aspects of garden design and advocated a style more purely imitative of nature. As such, his ideas were far more influential on the later "style paysagiste" than those of his contemporaries, and in many respects formed the (often unacknowledged) theoretical foundation for much of French garden design throughout the 19th century. The pre-eminent French theorist of natural garden design of his time. Ganay 98; Berlin Cat. 3469; Musset-Pathay 1822. 8vo (18 x 12cm); (viii) + 397 + (3) pp.; page 140 misnumbered p. 148.

Paris: J. Rothschild, 1870. The four large hand-colored folding plates to Siebeck’s third French edition, translated from the German by J. Rothchild. These four plates - in this example, linen-backed into two - form a stunning and very large colored lithographed image 72 x 54 inches wide, that is most often missing from this third Parisian edition. Siebeck, director of public parks and gardens for the city of Vienna, had considerable success with his park and garden plans, and with his writing; in addition to his German publications, his work was translated into French and English (Joseph Newton's PICTURESQUE GARDEN PLANS, 1864; THE LANDSCAPE GARDENER, 1876; and R.H. Westley's ELEMENTS OF THE ART OF LANDSCAPE GARDENING, 1861). This enormous plan accompanied the combination of two titles which had originally appeared separately: ELEMENTS D'HORTICULTURE OU JARDINS PITTORESQUES... and GUIDE PRATIQUE DU JARDINIER-PPAYSAGISTE. The former was issued with the four plates that combined to form one very large plan, and the latter with the 24 separate plates. These would correspond with the original German editions, DIE ELEMENTE DE LANDSCHAFTSGARTENKUNST IN EINEM PLANE DARGESTELLT...Leipzig, 1861, and IDEEN ZU KLEINEN GARTEN-ANLAGEN AUF VIERUNDZWANZIG COLORITEN PLANEN. Leipzig (1857-) 60. See GANAY 269, 3RD EDITION, 1870 for a complete explanation. The large hand-colored plan, composed of four folding plates, shows the outline of buildings, a long body of flowing water which forms a lake at one point, and several winding roads or paths interrupted by structures and lined with carefully placed individual or massed deciduous and coniferous trees. Rare and striking. Yes, that enormous plan. See Dochnahl p. 149 for earlier German editions. Loose, as issued, in printed portfolios (50 x 37 cm); 4 folding hand-colored lithographed plates, linen-backed into two larger plates in this copy.

(mostly) Rochester: various publishers, late 19th, early 20th centuries. A small unbound sampling of seven American nurserymen’s color plates, mostly from diverse Rochester, N.Y. printers. These plates, demonstrating both chromolithography and stencil or theorem color production, were produced mostly in Rochester, New York, in the second half of the 19th, and beginning of the 20th centuries, to assist and/or accompany” tree pedlars” or nurserymen and nursery salesmen in promoting the sales of the area’s booming nursery business. As described in Karl Sanford Kabelac’s “Nineteenth-Century Rochester Fruit and Flower Plates” ( Vol. XXXV, 1982 Univ.of Rochester Library Bulletin), salesmen were able to buy these plates in individual assortments or bound, sometimes mixing printers depending upon their needs. Here we have three chromolithographs - a Crawford’s Late Peach, an Early Canada Peach, and a Dickinson apple - by Stecher Lithographic Co. and its earlier incarnation, Mensing & Stecher. These would have been printed after 1878, with the Crawford’s Late produced in the late 1880s by Stecher alone. Kabelac identifies Franck A. Stecher as “a leader in the chromolithographic industry in Rochester.” The other four plates appear to be stencil or theorems, possibly with some color lithographed detail. The only one with an identified printer is the Dutchman’s Pipe “drawn and colored from Nature by C.M. Search” a horticultural painter as well as a fruit plate producer from the 1880s. Many of these plates were bound into portfolios or book albums and their owner/salesmen were encouraged to keep the plates as clean of thumb-soiling as possible after showing them to their fruit and flower buying clients. The plates could also be replaced in some of the portfolios. This grouping provides an interesting little study of the various methods of impressing the public with the color available from the nurserymen’s offerings. Seven plates, each measuring approximately 7.4 x 4.4 inches or 19 x 11 cm.; printed on one side only.

n.p: 2002. A dated album containing amateur colour photographs of COBRA artist Asger Jorn’s house exterior and garden at Albisolla in Italy. One of the photos shows the smiling COBRA-inspired Cuban artist Gina Pellon on the site. Jorn was a Danish artist who co-founded the avant-garde COBRA movement and was fundamental in the Situationist International Movement. Among many other things, Jorn was a ceramicist as is evident in the photos shown here around his Italian residence. Jorn evidently used ceramic fragments from local factories in his murals and sculptural objects. His house and garden in Albisolla on the Italian Riviera was both a refuge and the site of creativity for him in the post-War years. At his death, the villa went to the local municipality, which has slowly brought it back to life. At the time of this photo album the work was still in progress. Unique. With a photo of Gina Pellon at Albisolla. Each color photograph measures approximately 10 x 25 cm and is enclosed in a standard black paper- backed plastic pocket.

Paris: Auguste Ghio, n.d., ca. 1865. Illustrated with eight amusing and lovely two-toned lithographed plates of animated flowers. Six of the plates depict people transformed into flowers, with four examples on each plate. The other two plates depict scenes with an Enchanteur or Magician and human beings at the beginning and end of this fantastic tale. The story is loosely based on a variation of the German Faustus the Enchanteur legend, but it is the artistic treatment of the personified flowers that is of interest here. The flower bodies with human heads are similar to Grandville’s illustrations for LES FLEURS ANIMÉES of 1847, but here they are more defined as flowers. The artist’s signature on many of the plates is “Bertrand”; the printer is Becquet, Paris. The author was Rosine de La Salle Theodore Midy who wrote quite a number of works for children, including LA BOTANIQUE ILLUSTRÉE DE LA JEUNESSE and L’ALPHABET. The book is bound in printed floral paper covers with rusticated borders, signed L. Poguet. The covers also bear the name of the publisher Auguste Ghio, Palais-Royal. We find one copy with a different publisher (A. Courcier) at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Tolbiac; another copy is identified, but not located, in OCLC with a Library of Education publisher. Theodore Rosine de la Salle Midy was also published by Library of Education and A. Courcier - this is likely the same person. A very scarce Romantic floral fantasy. In the Style of Grandville 4to (30 x 22 cm.); 54 + (ii) pp. + 8 lithographed plates in two tints.