RABELAIS.
♦ Les Songes drolatiques de Pantagruel, ou sont contenues plusieurs figures de l'invention de maistre François Rabelais : & dernière œuvre d'iceluy, pour la recreation des bons esprits. Paris, Richard Breton, 1565. In-8, red morocco, small border decorated with a cordelière, surrounding a large decoration of four-lobed compartments and squares with four-lobes, the whole sown with filigree irons, foliage and festoons of fruits, spine decorated with a thousand points, interior roulette, gilt edges (Binding around 1800).
Brun, p. 295. - Mortimer, n°499. - Plan, n°XXXI.
Superb and famous suite of 120 grotesque and fantastic figures engraved on wood, in first edition, in the spirit of Peter Bruegel and Jerome Bosch.
This astonishing gallery gathers strange creatures, deformed or monstrous characters, dressed in costumes just as zany.
The engravings are devoid of text and are each drawn on a full page.
According to Jean Porcher, the drawings are by François Desprez, artist and embroiderer whose Richard Breton had published three years earlier a Recueil de la diversité des habits. These droll engravings, of a dizzying caricatural verve, are of a very firm drawing and a vigorous size although they seem to have been engraved quickly (Brun, pp. 60-61).
Obviously, François Rabelais took no part in this enterprise, and the association of his name in the title is only a purely commercial argument, intended to entice the public.
An adjusted copy. The binding seems to have been executed by Bozerian or an emulator, who adapted on the boards the cover of a 17th century book, richly decorated with small irons in the workshop of Boyet.
From the Ganay library (1881, n°171: the decoration of the plates is erroneously attributed to Le Gascon).
Small restoration in the lower margin of the title. Leaves C1 and C3 rebacked.
