Tuesday, February 28, 2006

A Nice Garden Book-

We're going to offer our Foggygates readers book special today, a nice early 19th century French gardening manual, just in time for Spring!
[Audot, Louise Eustache]. Figures pour l'Almanach du Bon Jardinier... Paris; Audot: ca.1817.

A charming gardening manual by a prolific and popular French horticultural author. Audot's manual, first published ca. 1813, went through several editions and offered the serious gardener complete nuts and bolts advice and diagrams for such advanced operations as cross-pollination, grafting and air-layering and espaliering trees. The plates include details of the leaves, flowers and sexual systems of various types of fruits and flowers, as well as examples of tools, shovels, rakes, scythes, pruners, barrows, and also several plans for greenhouses and cold frames. The plates are delicately engraved and very attractive.

Hardcover. 4.5"x7.25", 56 pages plus 27 copper engraved plates; bound in the (probably) original or at least contemporaneous blue boards, quite rubbed and scuffed now, with the top portion of the spine lacking; lacks front and rear blank endpapers, scattered offsetting from the plates; two plates with very minor attempts at hand-coloring, a bit of spotting and toning here and there; very minor wormhole in the gutter margin of several pages; institutional stamp, but not actually ex-institutional -one of our longtime customers donated some books to a college, and this got put in the box by mistake and stamped; he then retrieved it, and we eventually bought it from him). Overall internally a very nice copy in period boards.

We have this listed at $350.00, but if any Foggygates reader would like it for $250, we would be glad to sell it to you today.

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