Le Secret de Polichinel par Girin by GIRIN, [Raoul de la Girennerie de, Vicomte], illustrator

Paris: Chez Arnauld de Vresse, Libraire, 1850. 'Open Secrets'

GIRIN, [Raoul de la Girennerie de, Vicomte], illustrator. Le Secret de Polichinel par Girin. Paris: Chez Arnauld de Vresse, Libraire, [n.d., ca. 1850].

Large folio (13 1/4 x 9 7/8 inches; 336 x 251 mm.). Hand-colored lithographed title and eighteen hand-colored lithographed plates containing thirty-nine captioned scenes, all heightened with gum arabic. Plates lithographed by Laurant et Cie.

Publisher's pictorial yellow lithographed boards. Slight bubbling of paper edges of boards. Small chip missing from spine, light rubbing to board extremities, spine darkened. Endpapers slightly browned. An excellent copy.

Extremely scarce. We have been able to locate only one colored copy (The Bibliotheque National de France) and two uncolored copies (Harvard University, Houghton Library, MA, USA, and the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Germany).

"Polichinelle is the Punch of the old French puppet-shows, and his secrets are stage whispers told to all the audience" (Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable).

GIRIN, [Raoul de la Girennerie de, Vicomte] fl. 1830, was an artist lithographer. He edited and contributed illustrations for Le Journal Pour Rire in 1855. His other titles include Le Parisien hors de chez lui and Souvenirs et Impressions de voyage.