Album de pomologie
“A POMOLOGICAL RARITY”
FROM THE LIBRARY OF ROBERT de BELDER
Bivort, Alexandre Joseph Désiré and Laurent Séraph Joseph de Bavay (voll. II-III). Album de pomologie. Three volumes in one. Brussels: Deprez-Parent (vol. I) and Parent (voll. II-III), 1847–1849–1850. First edition.
Oblong quarto (9 1/8” x 12 1/16”, 234mm x 307mm): 2 binder’s blanks, half-title, title, 3pp. “postface,” text, 4pp. table; [8] vol. II half-title, blank, title, blank, 3pp. to subscribers, blank) 1 2-178 (pp. 173-178 table); [2] (title, blank) 1 2-168 (p. 165-168 table), 2 binder’s blanks. With a hand-colored lithographed title-page by Victor de Doncker and 137 (vol. I: 45, vol. II: 45, vol. III: 47) hand-colored lithographed plates, of which 1 (the “Raisin de la Palestine,” voll. II opposite p. 127) is double-page.
Bound in XXc green morocco by the Wigmore Bindery[1] (signed gilt at the front turn-in) with a gilt fillet border. On the spine, five raised bands. Title gilt to black morocco in the second panel. Dates gilt at the tail. Gilt fillet to the edges of the boards, and double to the turn-ins. Marbled end-papers.
Sunned, particularly at the spine. The front hinge starting at head and tail. Peripheral scuffing. The text-block tanned peripherally, with the odd foxing or offsetting. Splits and chips throughout. The first two leaves (vol. I half-title and the chromolithographed title) and the final four leaves encased in tissue. A graphite marginalium (giving the American name of a varietal) to p. 45 of vol. II. Graphite numeration (at least two campaigns) and notations against the tables throughout.
Alexandre Joseph Désiré Bivort (1802–1872) was the great XIXc Belgian pomologist. Armed with the seed collection of Jean-Baptiste Van Mons (cultivator of the Bosc and d’Anjou varieties of pear, among a great many other cultivars), Bivort cultivated one of the great orchards of Europe and thereby initiated the systematic, scientific study of fruit: pomology. Although he would go on to edit the Annales de Pomologie belge et étrangère from 1853, the present work — issued in monthly parts to subscribers like most of the great natural history works of the XVIIIc and XIX — was Bivort’s foundational text of the field, as important for its text as for its fastidiously-colored lithographed depictions of the fruits, generally two varietals together.
Indeed, it is probably because of the images’ beauty that so few complete sets survive; the work does not appear in Nissen’s Botanische Buchillustration, Great Flower Books, Dunthorne or Pritzel. Some 16 sets (the publication ran to a fourth volume, published 1851 and comprising 191 plates) are held in institutional collections (not in the British Library), but no systematic collation has taken place, preventing any confidence in normative assessments such as how many half-titles there should be.
From the library of Robert de Belder (1921–1995) and Jelena de Belder-Koracic, at whose Sotheby’s London sale, “Magnificent Botanical Books,” 27 April 1987, the volume was lot 27 (“a pomological rarity”). (Perhaps they purchased the volume 1 June 1981 at Sotheby’s London, lot 72 (“few leaves at beginning and end silked, green morocco, spine faded, by the Wigmore Bindery”).) De Belder was heir to a Belgian diamond company, and in 1952 acquired a 21-acre nursery at Kalmthout — not 50 miles north of Bivort’s orchards at Saint-Remy-Geest — where he cultivated a great many rare plants.
[1] Active at least in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
Item #JLR0781
Price: $25,000