Les Exemples de L’Art d'Escriture de Finance, et Italienne Bastarde de L’Invention, et de la main de Petré, Me. Escrivain Juré a Paris. Dediées A Monseigneur, Monseigneur de Bailleul, chevalier Baron de Chasteau-gontier, Conseiller du Roy en ses Conseils, President en sa Cour de Parlement de Paris, Sur-intendant des Finances, et Chancelier de la Reyne. (R. Cordier Abbavil sculpsit.)
Paris: Chez L’Autheur ruë St. Anthoine, au coing de St. Paul, a la Plume d’Or, 1647. In contemporary gilt vellum. Plates engraved by Robert Cordier, except for the coat of arms, which was engraved by Poilly (either François or Nicolas). Engraved title, engraved coat of arms, engraved dedication, 10 letterpress leaves {= [2 (unnumbered pages: “Au lecteur”, “Extraict du privilage du Roy”)] 1–11 [1 (blank)]. Binding tanned, stained, corners bumped, extremities rubbed. With several contemporary and later notes in brown ink throughout, mostly on the versos of the plates, and also on the the preliminary blank leaf. Inkblots occasionally, two leaves “burnt” by the ink one of them with loss of the engraving. Many pages water-stained, and damaged at the corners.
First edition of this exceedingly rare work on the art of calligraphy.
Jean Petré was a 17th-century French master scribe (maître écrivain) and calligrapher, author of the earliest French writing manuals and textbooks.
Les Exemples de L’Art d'Escriture de Finance, et Italienne Bastarde is among his rarest works, virtually unknown for bibliographies. The book begins with three engraved leaves (title page, a coat of arms, and a dedication), our copy has a preliminary blank leaf with handwritten texts samples in four or more different hands from the 17–18th century. This part is followed by a letterpress section consists of “Au Lecteur”, the Privilege, and the text of the pedagogical method to learn how to form ronde (Escriture de Finance) and italic (Escriture Italienne) scripts. The engraved plates are including four plates of alphabets of both scripts lower and upper case, nineteen pages of two to four lines writing examples in alphabetical order of their first letter (supposedly lacks three plates), and four plates with somewhat longer samples in form of a letter.
Extremely scarce, WorldCat locates only four copies in institutional holdigns. Two in the US (Harvard University, MA; Newberry Library, IL – both differ in the pagination of the letterpress part from our copy and call for more plates) and two copies in France (BnF — 17 p. of letterpress text, and no details on the plates; Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire Strasbourg – unpaginated and contains only 14 plates). We could trace another copy at Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris (same pagination as the present one, but calls for 31 plates).
Price: €5,000.00