La curiosité naturelle redigee en questions selon l’ordre Alphabetique. Par M. Scipion du Pleix Conseiller & Advocat du Roy au siege Presidial de Condom, & M. des Requestes ordinaire de la Royne Marguerite
ONE OF TWO KNOWN EXAMPLES
Ex-coll. Hunt Botanical Library and the
Real Convento de la Paciencia de Cristo, Madrid
Paris: Chez la Vefve Dominique Salis, 1609. Second edition (see below).
Duodecimo (5 5/16” x 3 3/16”, 136mm x 81mm): ã12 ê6 A-Cc12 [$6 signed, – ã1, B6; E6 mis-signed “E vij”]. 330 leaves, foll. [18] (title, blank, 6pp. epistle, 3pp. verses, 8pp. contents, 2pp. to the reader, errata, privilege, 12pp. preface, blank), 1-312.
Bound in contemporary stabbed limp vellum with yapp edges. On the spine, title in ink manuscript. All edges of the text-block speckled red.
Two pairs of ties perished. Some splits to the paste-downs. Quires I, Aa-Cc tanned, but otherwise quite a clean example. Bookplate of the Hunt Botanical Library (with “HBL Withdrawn” in graphite) to the front paste-down. Ink-stamp of the Real Convento de la Paciencia de Cristo, Madrid (legend: “EX BIBLIOTHECA CAPUCCINORUM PATIENTIÆ XPI MATRIT”) to the verso of the title-leaf. Acquisition note in graphite to the rear paste-down: “Rostenberg $25.00 IV-61”. Ink manuscript sums in an old hand to the rear paste-down.
Scipion Dupleix (1569–1661) was a courtier of Marguerite of Valois (a k a Queen Margot of Navarre and then France from 1589) upon her return to Paris in 1605. Her marriage with Henri IV had been annulled in 1599, and so her position in the capital — queen emerita, of sorts — left her a good deal of time for establishing a parallel court to that of her successor on the throne, Marie de’ Medici (known among the French aristocracy as “the fat banker,” and never fully accepted). Dupleix served as Marguerite’s maître des requêtes, the direct intermediary for appeals or petitions, albeit usually to a reigning monarch.
Despite his close ties to Queen Margot, he served as tutor to Antoine de Bourbon-Bueil (1607–1632), legitimated son of Henry IV by Jacqueline, comtesse de Moret. The present work, first published in 1606, served as a job-application of sorts for the role; it is in a sense the prototype of Rousseau’s Emile crossed with the Encyclopédie. The book, alphabetized by topic — accroisement to yvre et yvroigne (“growth” to “drunkenness and drunkards”) — is structured as a series of questions and answers. Though difficult to verify, Dupleix is noted as the first author in French to use side-notes to cite his sources.
The book — first published by Sonius [sic] in 1606— had its true second edition (essentially a page-for-page reissue) in the present item (of which only one other example, at the Huntington Library (400126), is recorded on OCLC). Despite the claims of other cataloguers, the book quickly went through many editions with various imprints: Sonnius and Gueffier in Paris in 1613, Angot in Rouen in 1615, Gueffier and “Saunius” in Paris in 1618, Rigaud in Lyon in 1618 and again in 1620 — continuing through the second quarter of the XVIIc. The simplicity and breadth of the book’s treatment justifies the robust demand; its small size perhaps accounts for the paucity of its survival.
The present volume has the ownership stamp of the library of the Capuchin convent in Madrid, the Real Convento de la Paciencia de Cristo, founded by Philip IV in 1639. Badly damaged in the Napoleonic Wars, the convent was dissolved in 1836 and its library, presumably, disbursed by some means. It then entered the Hunt Botanical Library, the collection of Rachel McMasters Miller Hunt (1882–1963), perhaps the greatest American collector of material related to the natural world. Perhaps Hunt bought it from Leona Rostenberg (a legendary independent book-dealer in New York) in April of 1961. It is marked as withdrawn, though sadly the earliest example still at the Hunt (managed by Carnegie Mellon Libraries) in from 1626.
The present item was offered for sale by Christie’s London 27 November 1992 (lot 202), the only time any edition pre-1623 has been at auction per Rare Book Hub.
Not in the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Item #JLR0600
Price: $4,500