CABINET DE CURIOSITÉ LITTÉRAIRE. ESOTÉRISME. GOTHICS. TOMBS - Lot 29

CABINET DE CURIOSITÉ LITTÉRAIRE. ESOTÉRISME. GOTHICS. TOMBS OF THOUGHT. MANUSCRIPT ALBUM. Devil's Library. 18th-19th century; Composite manuscript forming a factitious collection of texts, engravings and scores, forming an exceptional and heterogeneous ensemble of poems, songs, riddles, epitaphs, scores, sometimes old prints and rare printed pieces, a "baroque gallery" of an erudite mind where the saucy rubs shoulders with piety and satire. Fort in-4 (19 x 24 x 5.5 cm). Paginated in red ink up to 350 pp. followed by 51 blank ff. on watermarked laid paper and 3 ff. on separate paper. Text in red and black ink, framed by black fillets, mixing handwritten and printed matter. Re-used binding in 18th-century shagreened basane, spine ribbed and decorated with gilt fleurons, red morocco title-piece (later), red edges, double cold fillet on the boards. Contains 216 engravings and iconographic elements, including : A black proof of Rembrandt's engraving Adam and Eve (1638) (cf.NGA, Washington, inv. 9898). Rebacked, cut short to in-12 format and slightly oxidized. Portraits of authors; religious (Notre-Dame de Lorette) and gallant prints; landscapes and pen-and-ink drawings (pp. 144, 148, 233); a watercolor in ink; calligrams and vignettes in tondo. Several rare items: Mazarinade (La Rencontre d'un Gascon et d'un Poitevin, Paris, 1649, 12 pp.), in which mockery, an editorial hallmark of the genre, guides the reader's interpretation; fragments of manuscripts on vellum (Latin and French); manuscript and engraved scores (including La Liberta by Metastasio/Dherbain, 18th-century engraved Iroquois airs). Various texts: poems, riddles, logogriphs, epitaphs (pp. 311-320, in French and Latin), extracts from Abbé Lenglet du Fresnoy, Louise-Madeleine Horthemels (copy of remontrances des comédiens français, pp. 7-15), and Brunet (Epître à Monsieur de Fontenelle, 1751). The work closes with an improbable 19th-century vignette, a kind of ex libris, with an embossed and colored pig, titled: "Gare les truffes!" (Beware of truffles!), pasted on a flyleaf. This collection seems to have passed through several hands, enriched with the passing of owners, reinforcing its esoteric aspect. One is identified by the presence of his engraved ex libris: Achille Kuhnholtz-Lordat (1843-1919), naturalist, academician and collector, member of the Académie des Sciences and collector. The set evokes the spirit of a gallery of erudition and fantasy, typical of literary cabinets of curiosity, where satire, devotion and libertine fragments mingle.The item has been rebound, binding rubbed but solid.