Földvári Books

An Unrecorded Saint-Domingue Incunable

[Caption titles:] Extrait des régistres du Conseil du Port-au-Prince. (Séance du 21 Julliet 1764, au matin.) [And:] Extrait des régistres du Conseil Souverain du Port-au-Prince. (Séance du 27 juillet 1754[!], au matin.)

[Au Cap François]. [Antoine Marie], [1764]. First edition. Sewn bound. 17, (3) p. Untrimmed. Three tiny brown spots on the first page. In fine condition.

Very early, unrecorded Saint-Domingue imprint.

Printing in Saint-Domingue origins in the second half of the 18th century. The first printer who established himself on the isle was Antoine Maria (Cabon, 1919). Marie was born in Nantes in 1730 and obtained the exclusive patent and royal privilege for printing in Saint-Domingue in 1762 (see: Brevet d’Imprimeur exclisif, 1762). He arrived on the island in late 1763 and established his printing house in Cap-François (present-day Cap-Haïtien). His first slight pieces of prints were made probably as early as January 1764. Marie’s first significant product was the initial issue of the first official journal of the colony, the Gazette de Saint-Domingue (published between February 1 and August 8, 1764), which was continued under the title Avis divers et petites affiches américaines. He continued publishing various newsmagazines and administrative prints in the following years, and soon before his death in December 1767, he opened a second printing house in Port-au-Prince in September 1767. His business was carried on for a short time by Thomin & Le Blanc, and his privilege was transferred to a new printer named Guillot on September 28, 1768 (Bulletin, 1950).

Only a very few titles are recorded by this pioneer printer and publisher of Saint-Domingue, and the present one is not among those. From 1764, the year of the establishment of the printing shop only one book title is known by bibliographies, an anterior but related publication Imposition de quatre millions sur la Colonie de S. Domingue, which was printed after March 12, while the present brochure in late July. We also possess a sequel of Imposition from the same year, a hitherto unrecorded book, the Complément de l’Imposition de quatre millions sur la Colonie de S. Domingue (printed after June 14, 1764).

The present records of the seances held on July 21 and 27, 1764, concern — just as the aforementioned books — with the administrative matters, trade and taxation related to the four million livres which the French administration imposed on the colony of Saint-Domingue, partly as a support of the costs of the colonial administration (Ghachem, 2012) and partly as an exchange for ending the military government and dissolving the colonial militia, which was on one hand a request of the ‘patriotic’ colonists and on the other a necessity of the devastated French economy after the conclusions of the Seven Years’ War and the French Indian War (Geggus-Fiering, 2009).

Unrecorded by bibliographies, and we could not trace any copies in institutional holdings.

Bibl.: Brevet d’Imprimeur exclisif à Saint-Domingue. Du 31 Décembre 1762. In: Loix et constitutions des Colonies françoises de l’Amerique sous le vent […]. Tome quatrieme. Paris: Moutart [etc]. 1785. pp. 533–534.; Bulletin of the New York Public Library. Volume 54, 1950. p. 198.; Cabon, A.: Un siècle et demi de journalisme en Haïti (1919). In: Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, April 1939. p. 123–124.; Geggus, D. P., Fiering, N.: The World of the Haitian Revolution. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. p. 55.; Ghachem, M. W.: The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. p. 94.

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Price: €4,000.00