Pierre-Paul Dubuisson (French, 1707-1762) Almanach Royal, leap year 1768 A Paris, chez Le Breton, Premier Imprimeur ordinaire du Roi, rue de la Harpe. With the King's approval and privilege (1767). In-8, 542 pages. Full red morocco, decorated with a rich plate by Pierre-Paul Dubuisson. Spine with 5 nerves, decorated with fleurs-de-lys, roulette on the edges; superb Augsburg paper endpapers with celadon green stripes on a gold background. All edges gilt. (tiny paper defect on folio V6, affecting 2 letters on verso: "Montma...e" for "Montmartre"). Pierre-Paul Dubuisson. A royal almanac for the year 1768. Conceived in 1684 by Laurent d'Houry, the Almanach Royal received Louis XIV's approval in 1699. It was published annually from 1700 to 1792. The Almanach Royal provides important information on the administration of France and the European courts, as well as on the customs of the time. It includes details of the royal courts and state bodies, lists of members of the Academies, the Parliament, the Chancellery, the Queen's Household, the army corps, the Admiralty, the General Farm, etc., as well as the names of factory inspectors, stockbrokers and bankers, the King's physicians and surgeons, "Maistres en l'art et science de chirurgie de la Ville de Paris", oculists and apothecaries... Some forty pages are devoted to "L'ordre général des courriers, avec le jour et l'heure de leur départ pour les lettres, tant dedans que dehors le royaume", as well as to "Messageries Royales, coches et carosses, avec le jour de leur départ", not forgetting the coches d'eau. The book concludes with an impressive list of the kingdom's "most important fairs". The almanac was useful to almost all classes of society, and enjoyed considerable success. The "simple" bindings were in basane or calf. However, important or wealthy people wanted richly decorated morocco bindings, on which they could occasionally apply their coat of arms. The demand for these morocco bindings was so strong that fashionable bookbinders used gilded plates for their ornamentation, rather than petit fers. The finest of these plate bindings are those of Pierre-Paul Dubuisson (1707-1762), later struck by his successors. Some fifteen different plates by Dubuisson are known, 12 of which were described and illustrated in the Librairie Morgand catalog, Livres dans des rich reliures, compiled by Edouard Rahir in 1910, and 2 others in Pierre Bérès's booklet, "Collection d'almanachs royaux", distributed around 2005. This 1768 almanac is decorated with the plates "Rahir184 d, année 1765", "Bérès c, année 1763" in perfect condition. The approval of this copy is dated December 23, 1767.