Les Petites Visites.

Calman Levy, Paris., 1896 Text in French. [8, including 3 blanks], 246 printed pages, plus table & blank at end. Number one of five numbered copies on papier de chine. Signed and inscribed by the owner on folding extra-wide half title. The dedication is to Philippe Gille "son ami reconnaissant" (his grateful friend). Original orange printed wrppers bound in. Beautiful marbled endpapers. Top edge gilt. Green silk bookmarker. Fully uncut, such that some leaves are a few centimetres wider than others. Previous owner's heraldic bookplate ("Wachsthum Und Stetigkeit") of Newton Hall, Cambridge. Signature of J.S. in upper left-hand corner; depicts a coat of arms with four lions. Bookplate for Henry Walston, Baron Walston, (1912 - 1991) a farmer and politician from Newton, Cambridgeshire, UK. Bookbinders printed signature (S.David) on front free endpaper. 14 x 19.5 cm. Brown half crushed Levant morocco. Spine richly tooled in gilt with lettering and date surrounded by lavish decoration including a mask, birds and floral scrolls in a classical art nouveau style. Corners very slightly worn. The binder was Salvador David (1859-1929), a notable art nouveau craft bookbinder and his bookbindings are in major collections (e.g. Rene Descamps-Scrive and Freund-Deschamps)[de Crauzat, Ernest, "La Reliure Francaise de 1900 a 1925, vol. 2 , Paris, 1932, pp.55-56]. Lavedan was a playwright and dramatist of comedies of manners, that pictured frivolous but worldly Parisian life with a starker social sub-text. Two of his plays (Catherine & Le Duel) were made into films in the 1920's & 1930's. Philippe Emile François Gille (1831-1901) was a French dramatist and opera librettist, from Paris who wrote over twenty librettos between 1857 and 1893, the most famous of which are Massenet's Manon and Delibes' Lakmé. Gille became secretary of the Théâtre Lyrique then from 1869 an art and music correspondent for Le Figaro. He was elected to the Académie des beaux-arts in 1899. This is a unique and finely bound copy.. 1st Edition. Hardcover. Near Fine.