Bibliotheque portative des voyages. Tome vignt-huitième. Atlas du troisième voyage de James Cook, Contenant une carte générale des trois Voyages de Cook, et vingt-deux planches en taille-douce.
Cook, James, Captain. Bibliotheque portative des voyages. Tome vignt-huitième. Atlas du troisième voyage de James Cook, Contenant une carte générale des trois Voyages de Cook, et vingt-deux planches en taille-douce. Paris: la veuve Lepetit, 1804.
Small quarto (6 9/16” x 5”, 167mm x 127mm): π4. 4 leaves, pp. 1–5 6–7 (series title, blank, title, blank, 3pp. plate list) [1] (blank). With 23 plates on 21 sheets, one of which is a folding map.
Bound in brown paper boards. On the spine, “Trois voyage de Cook” gilt to the second panel and “Atlas” gilt to the fourth.
Backstrip rubbed at the head and heel. Scuffing to the boards. Spotting to the title leaf, not affecting the text.
The Bibliothèque portative des voyages was a XIXc. collection of translated exploration narratives, primarily published in the first decade of the century by Mademoiselle Veuve Lepetit (née Aimée Grassot) in Paris. Grassot had worked alongside her husband in the publishing world but began releasing volumes under her own title — as the imprint suggests — following her husband’s death in 1802. Translated and edited by Pierre-François Henry and Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Breton de la Martinière, the series made major international travel and discovery accounts accessible in the French language. Bibliothèque portative des voyages featured the legendary voyages of explorers James Cook, James Bruce, John Barrow, and George Macartney. Text volumes were issued in octodecimo or sextodecimo formats designed for portable reading, and their accompanying atlases were similarly printed in miniature. The collection ran across dozens of distinct volumes, but production slowed as Grassot and her employees became targets of the Napoleonic Book Trade Office throughout 1810. The Imperial regime cracked down on writings deemed offensive to public morals, works that evoked the excesses of the Revolution, those that alluded to current events, or those that offered excessive praise of liberty. Grassot was interrogated and briefly imprisoned at the convent Les Madelonnettes after authorities seized copies of the Jean-François Laignelot’s Rienzi — a work that had thinly veiled critiques of the Emperor —from her shop. Paris’s printing business faltered as authors looked to cities without militant censorship policing for their publishing needs, but Grassot would continue to sell out of her shop on rue Pavée-Saint-André-des-Arts until her death in 1834. Today, her original editions survive in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France have been digitized via Gallica, leading to modern print-on-demand archival reproductions by publishers like Hachette Livre.
Sorel. Napoléon et le Livre pp. 93–156.
Cataloged by G.R. Murdock
Item #GRM0101
Price: $3,000