A Thousand Years of French Books : Catalogue of an Exhibition of Manuscripts, First Editions and Bindings

Cambridge University Press, [Cambridge], first edition, 1948. Library cloth, gilt spine, 4to, 22 cm,. 131 pp, [1] folded leaf. 337 entries. Exhibition arranged by Desmond Flower for the National Book League. From the Foreword: "The intention of this display is to show something of every side of the making of books in which France has excelled during the past thousand years. The exhibits have been drawn as largely as possible from British libraries and collections, generously supplemented and enriched by a highly important group from the French National Libraries and a further small group from French private collections. The earliest exhibits slightly antedate the thousand years' in order to include the Carolingian Uncials and Minuscules which formed such an important contribution to the development of calligraphy. The terminal date of 1920 has been chosen for two reasons. The period between the wars produced in France a large number of writers who, judged at such close range, appear approximately to be of equal standing - only time will bring them into perspective. To have extended the exhibition to the present would have involved numerous invidious distinctions if the cases devoted to the present were not heavily to outweigh those representing the past. The same period saw also the extraordinarily rich outpouring of illustrated éditions de luxe begun earlier in the century by Ambroise Vollard. These have recently been most adequately shown to the public at the National Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Institut Français, and a terminal date of 1920 has enabled the present display to be confined to the smaller books produced by the same artists before the first world war, which are less sumptuous but less often seen to-day. An ex-library copy with laminated plastic covering the library cloth, a bookplate and withdrawn stamp on the front pastedown endpaper, docket on the rear pastedown endpaper.