Art du paumier-raquetier, et de la paume
[Paris?] 1767.
Folio (18” x 12”, 458mm x 305mm): π2 A-H2 I2(–I2) [$1 signed]. 19 leaves, pp. i-ii (title, blank) iii-iv 1-34. With 5 engraved plates.
Bound in contemporary grey wrappers. All edges of the text-block untrimmed.
Entirely unsophisticated, with some peripheral chips or wear. Text-block more or less tanned, the plates quite clean. Loss (paper fault?) to the lower edge of A1, not affecting the text. Simply sewn in five courses along the spine, the lower band starting at the first quire. An altogether miraculous survival.
François-Alexandre Pierre de Garsault (1693–1778) was born to the equerry to Louis XIV. Employed at the royal stud, he turned his pen (as well as his pencil; he provided his own illustrations) first to equestrian matters and then more broadly to natural history; he was the first to name the genus Cygnus (swans). In the late 1760’s he wrote for the Académie des Sciences about the traditional crafts (métiers) of France, including saddlemaking, cobbling, tailoring and, as here, the manufacture of racquets.
The history of tennis (thought to be from “tenez” (hold or take), shouted like “timber” just before the serve) is the subject of a library of studies, but in brief, the cluster of palm (jeu de paume) and racquet sports emerged in the XIIc in France and blossomed throughout the monastic and noble centers of Europe. “Real tennis” — distinguished from “lawn tennis,” which is the popular modern game; badminton, handball and squash all ultimately have a common ancestor — points to this aristocratic history, which is connected to specific indoor courts that reflect the architecture of the buildings in which they were situated. The courts were asymmetrical (service and hazard ends, slope-roofed penthouses on 3 sides) and their racquets varied from solid wood — not unlike modern pickle-ball racquets — through to open-framed and tilted-head racquets strung with gut, not unlike a modern squash or tennis racquets.
The present work discusses the court as well as the theory of construction of the racquets as well as the balls. The makers of these tools, paumiers-raquettiers, were incorporated in 1610 to establish a system of apprenticeship and to maintain standards. Though the popularity of the game had declined significantly by the late XVIIIc, it still merited inclusion in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, the Enlightenment collection aiming to present all knowledge.
The book is rare, with just eight examples in U.S. institutional collections per OCLC. Some auction records suggest a larger complement of plates, but the present volume collates perfect against the BnF copy (though it has a 1761 full title page listing Saillant & Nyon and Desaint as publishers; this is obviously difficult to square with the date on the title-page of the work). Noel & Clark call the work “excessively rare,” though “Mr. Clark and Mr. Noel are among the few collectors who have a copy.”
Clark & Noel, History of Tennis p. 285.
Item #JLR0769
Price: $9,500