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[Flournois, Gédéon].
A Utopian novel with a false imprint. Sa Les entretiens des voyageurs sur la mer.
Publisher: Chez Pierre Marteau, & se vend à Londres, chez Henri Ribotteau, Libraries dan le Stand où l’on trouve un assortiment general de Musique. Cologne [i.e. London?];
Date of Publication: 1715
Stock Code: 14842
The first illustrated edition, the first in four volumes, and the first published in England. Four volumes. Duodecimo, pp., 352, frontispiece and 4 engraved plates within pagination; 472, frontispiece and 16 plates; 335, [1], frontispiece and 7 plates; 324, frontispiece and 7 plates. Sig. A-O¹² P⁸; A-T¹² V⁶; A-O¹²;A-N¹² O⁶. Collated and complete. Titled in red and black, engraved vignette to title-pages by ‘Sluijter’ (perhaps Pieter Sluyter (1675-1713)); woodcut ornaments throughout. Uniform contemporary vellum, titled and numbered in ink to spines, all edges sprinkled red. Faint ‘129’ in red ink to upper board of first volume, ‘F:B 1862’ in pencil to front free end-paper Light soiling to boards, corners bumped, top edges dusty. Three plates offset to facing pages, but contents otherwise clean, bright, and rather fresh. An excellent set. A satirical, anti-Catholic novel depicting a diverse group of religious people shipwrecked on a desert island. In twenty-four dialogues, a group of religiously diverse individuals including Calvinists, Lutherans, Anabaptists, a Jewish individual, and two Jesuits in disguise debate Protestantism while stranded in South Africa. The 34 plates within are bombastic and imaginative illustrations of Reformation polemic. They include images of bishops firing cannons, Catholics burning books in a pyre, sword fights between debaters, storms blown by perfidious priests, and the characters stranded on a shore with a leopard.
The notorious false imprint ‘Pierre Marteau’ and false locator ‘Cologne’ signal the book’s controversial content, while disguising its true place of printing (Hoftijzer, ‘Pierre Marteau’). The book’s publisher, Henri Ribboteau (fl. 1695-1719) was the son of a French Protestant exile from Saumur, who fled following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 (Shaw, 7). Ribboteau was part of a community of Huguenot book-trade professionals who operated businesses around the Strand. This book rails against the Catholic oppression of Protestants in France, and the reign of Louis XIV, who died the year this book was published.
A scarce work of illustrated satire from the hotbed of the clandestine Huguenot press. £1250.00