Idées cadeaux Voyages & Aventures | Gift Ideas Travel & Adventure

First edition, one of 15 numbered copies on Hollande paper, the leading copies.
This copy with the original frontispiece lithograph by André Masson.
Hors-texte illustrations by André Masson.
A very good and rare copy.

Text “Les chapeaux pliants” over a double-page by Vaudreuil, illustrated with five original colour drawings in the text.

Original print by Mario Simon on the last page of the double sheet. 

La Gazette du Bon Ton, one of the most beautiful and influential fashion magazines of the 20th century, celebrating the talent of French designers and artists at the height of the Art Deco movement.

To our knowledge unpublished autograph letter signed by Ernest Hemingway to Roberto Herrera Sotolongo, 2 pages in blue ink on both sides of a sheet, and envelope postmarked September 19, 1953 with his autograph return address ("E. Hemingway...") on the back.

The letter begins in Spanish and continues in English, before ending with a few Spanish words signed "Mister Papa".

A magnificent letter from Hemingway to his Cuban friend and secretary, recounting his 1953 safari in Kenya. Hemingway reveals the true outcome of the hunt for the black-maned lion, a central theme of his posthumous novel True at first light (1999) later published as Under Killimanjaro (2005).

The writer shares his encounters with a giraffe and an impala, as well as unpublished spear hunts with the Masai, reconnecting with the emotions of his first African adventure twenty years earlier which had inspired classic parts of the Hemingway canon – The Green Hills of Africa, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short happy life of Francis Macomber.

He also recalls a family tragedy: a rare attempt at reconciliation from his third child Gigi, who was suffering from gender dysphoria.

Original drawing with graphite, blue and pink colored pencils signed by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, on a sheet of watermarked paper “Navarre”. Hor­izontal fold, pencil annotation in the upper left margin, very small loss of paper in the lower right margin.

A remarkable caricature signed by Saint-Exupéry, akin to a cartoon character. The writer-aviator-artist very rarely signed his graphic works.

First edition, with seven folding plates engraved by Hallmandel after G. Schärf.
Beige full calf binding, spine with five raised bands framed in gilt, gilt lettered morocco title label lengthwise, stamped arms of the Society of Writers to the Signet in the center of the boards. Restored spine and corners, brittle spine ends, spalls and stains to boards.

A very rare and important publication by the British Consul General in Egypt in 1815, Henry Salt (1780-1827),involved in the excavation of several historical sites and the collection of numerous antiquities. The most remarkable of these is the colossal bust of Ramses II found at Thebes and housed in the British Museum, which is said to have inspired Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias". Salt carefully reproduces and explains various inscriptions, bearing the cartouches of Egyptian gods and pharaohs. He made valuable contributions to the understanding of hieroglyphics, following Thomas Young's work on the Rosetta Stone and Jean-François Champollion's groundbreaking discoveries presented in 1822. Historiography even proved that he successfully translated some Egyptian names independently of Champollion's work.

Provenance: bindings with the arms of the Society of Writers to the Signet, Scottish sollicitors association founded in the late 16th century. Library shelf label glued to the flyleaf.

First edition of the French translation by A. J. B. Defauconpret. Illustrated vi­gnette on the title page of each volume, with two illustrations in each volume (60 in total) by Louis Marckl after Noël Bertrand.
Green half shagreen binding, spine with five raised bands elaborately framed in gilt and blind, spine-ends stamped with a gilt rosette bearing cabbalistic signs, marbled paper boards, marbled endpa­pers and pastedowns, speckled edges, contemporary bindings.
Spines slightly lightened, some corners slightly dulled, more pronounced foxing on some volumes, a tear not affecting text to pp. 303-304 of vol. 2, a restored tear and a marginal lack of paper not af­fecting text to pp. 213-214 of vol. 5.

Autograph letter signed by James Fen­imore Cooper in French, bound in the first volume, written to Charles Goss­elin, publisher of his complete works.
Slight folds to the corners of the leaf, pencil and pen notes by a previous bib­liographer.

Handsomely bound set, exceptionally containing an autograph letter signed by the author to his publisher.

First edition of this work considered to be Grandville's masterpiece, with illustrations in first print.

Illustrated frontispiece, 36 colored illustrations and 146 in-text woodcuts in black.

Contemporary binding in blue half glazed calf, sunned spine with gilt arabesques, small holes at foot of spine, marbled paper boards, mould made endpapers and flyleaves, speckled edges. 
This exuberant and prodigious production of Grandville and Delord (whose name is printed at the bottom of page 292), judged by its contemporaries as already being mad, was rediscovered by the Surrealists.

"Published in 1844 by éditions Fournier, Un autre monde is Grandville's masterpiece. The book is subtitled Transformations, visions, incarnations, ascensions, locomotions, explorations, travels, excursions, stations, cosmogonies, phantasmagorias, dreams, frolics, facetiae, whims, metamorphosis, zoomorphs, lithomorphosis, metempsychosis, apotheosis and other things. With its transformations, its inventions and its phantasmagoria, the work claims to reflect a changing era. Un autre monde recounts and illustrates the extraordinary travels of three neo-gods, Puff, Krackq and Hahblle. [...] It is indeed a philosophical journey that Grandville takes us on [...] The reader, led to a strange planet imagined by the artist, is invited, like Gulliver in the Country of Laputa, on a parodic journey of his philosophical, scientific, economic and religious ideas, of his passions, inventions and worries: romanticism, mechanisation, socialism, money, serial, publicity, anglomania, philanthropy, phrenology, etc." (Annie Renonciat, La Vie et l'œuvre de Grandville, Paris, ACR-Vilo, 1985).


Grandville's most sought-after work.

Chez Théodore Le Gras, à Paris 1728, 12° (9,5x17cm), (2 p.) xvij (7 p.) 346 pp.; (2 p.) ij 376 pp.; (2 p.) ij 387 pp.; (6 p.) 392 pp.; (6 p.) 404 pp., 5 volumes bound.
First edition of this famous description of West Africa.
78 full-page engraved plates:
- volume 1: 5 maps, 2 plates and 1 folding plan
- volume 2: 6 maps, 17 plates and 4 folding plans
- volume 3: 2 maps and 13 plates
- volume 4: 5 maps, 8 plates and 3 folding plans
- volume 5: 3 maps and 9 plates
First edition of this famous description of West Africa. Illustrated with 78 full-page engraved plates.
Contemporary beige calf, spine elaborately gilt, 19th century red leather title and volume pieces, all red edges. Joints and spine-ends very skillfully restored. An old strip of white paper hiding the name of a former owner on each volume.
Based on the memoirs of André Brue (director of the Senegal Royal Company), this study contains interesting details on commercial companies in Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea, Gambia and Sierra Leone, customs of the inhabitants, religious beliefs, natural history, etc. Many passages concern the slave trade.
“Jean-Baptiste Labat (1663-1738), more commonly known as Father Labat, was a Dominican missionary, botanist, explorer, ethnographer, military man, landowner, engineer and writer.
A staunch defender of slavery, he played an important role in the sugar cane industry in the French West Indies. He is known for developing a type of brandy to cure fever, which after some improvements became rum.” (Museum of Art and History, Le Havre)

Autograph manuscripts and epigraphic studies with several drawn maps (108 leaves and 86 half-leaves, as well as 28 pages with numerous glued papers) in paper folders and a notebook with a cloth cover titled “Decrees of Alexandria”. Numerous tears to the margins and paper folders, stained cloth cover.
Important unpublished set of epigraphy manuscripts by Egyptologist Auguste Baillet (1834-1923), colleague and friend of Gaston Maspero, the leader of French Egyptology.

Precious notebooks gathering the remarkable philological work of Auguste Baillet, who carried out from the 1860s until his death in 1923 meticulous transcriptions and translations of hieroglyphic, Greek and demotic inscriptions on Egyptian temples, steles, statues, papyrii, and vases. He contributed to the titanic project of a catalog raisonné of Egyptian monuments started by Gaston Maspero. The countless pieces of paper covered with hieroglyphs transcribe the inscriptions of Egyptian monuments deposited in Paris and London museums or in private collections Auguste Baillet had the opportunity to study. Maps of the Nile delta, ancient Palestine and Syria are included in this prolific scientific work, as well as copies and personal translations of the founding texts of hieroglyphic epigraphy, notably those used by Champollion (Rosetta Stone, Turin Papyrus, Decree of Canopus, Book of the Dead...).
The notebooks bring together notes on the latest archaeological finds, as well as surveys and translations covering many periods of Egyptian history: Amarna, Ramesside, Ptolemaic... Baillet makes his own hypotheses and compares the scientific sources of his contemporaries and predecessors, in particular the founding works of Champollion, Maspero, his German colleagues Winckler, Lapsius, Brugsch or the British Flinders Petrie. One of the notebooks contains an unpublished article comparing the versions of the decree of Memphis of Prolemaeus V on the Rosetta Stone and the temple of Philae, following one of his published studies (Le Décret de Memphis et les inscriptions de Rosette et de Damanhour, 1888). He writes dozens of pages on the inscriptions from the monuments of Saïs and Philae, in spite of very incomplete epigraphic material, and draws on several pages very precise maps of Syria and Palestine under Akhenaten. Among many other studies and bibliographical references, he records on tiny, pasted papers an exhaustive epigraphic index of dignitaries appearing in the famous archives of Tell el Amarna discovered in 1891.
The importance of such handwritten documents is primordial for the young science of Egyptology at the end of the 19th century. At the time, knowledge was developing more through handwritten records and epistolary exchanges between scholars than through printed works. It was still very difficult to obtain hieroglyphic typeface in French provinces or even abroad. Manuscript collections of Egyptian texts such as this one therefore proved to be even more precious for research.
Archivist Auguste Baillet found his vocation as an Egyptologist after reading the famous Lettre à Dacier by Jean-François Champollion, unveiling for the first time the secret of hieroglyphs. Abandoning his position in the Empire's archives, he signed his first essays in the 1860s. He took part in the work of a burgeoning French school of Egyptology and studied namely the hieroglyphic numbering system in collaboration with the great scholar Théodule Devéria, as well as ancient Egyptian administrative organization and dialects. He also compared the still divergent methods of transcription of hieroglyphic characters, in a context of great international competition between British, German, and French scholars.
His son Jules Baillet inherited his father's passion and participated in several archaeological missions in Egypt. A fragment of a letter on the back of one of the manuscript leaves attests to the extraordinary intellectual emulation between father and son, who frequently corresponded on epigraphic questions “My dear Jules, [...] to make the passage of col. IV l. 4-8 correct, if not elegant, it is enough to move NE QUID [...] I am always relentless on the restitution of the decrees of Memphis and Alexandria” (letter, May 4, 1885). His studies on the temple of Philae present in this notebook were most certainly used by his son for the history of the temple he published in 1893. They also wrote several studies together and donated numerous Egyptian artifacts to the Orleans Museum of Art and History, coming from Jules Baillet's archaeological missions in Thebes.
The works of Baillet, apart from the manuscripts in this set, were published in 1905 in the prestigious Bibliothèque égyptologique directed by Gaston Maspero.

First edition, advance copy stamp at foot of spine.

A pleasant copy despite the very slightly faded spine.

Rare copy signed and inscribed by Paul Nizan to Louis-Martin Chauffier.