Les Baisers du Mois de Mai
first edition
1770
by DORAT
1770. DORAT, Claude Joseph. Les Baisers, précédés du Mois de Mai, poëme. 119 pp. Illustrated with engraved additional title-page, engraved title-vignette, engraved frontispiece, 22 vignettes and 22 culs-de-lampe, all after Charles Eisen. BOUND WITH: Supplément a l'édition des baisers... Imitations de poëtes latins. 47 pp. 8vo., 210 x 133 mm, bound by Riviere in early twentieth-century crushed red morocco, spine gilt with small tools, comb-marbled endpapers, a.e.g. La Haye & Paris: Lambert et Delalain, 1770. First Edition, second issue, acclaimed by both Portalis and Cohen as "the masterpiece of the eighteenth century" and by Salomons as "one of the most gracefully and beautifully illustrated books ever produced..." "The twenty-two headpieces and twenty tailpieces with which Eisen adorned Dorat's hundred odd pages of text turn the book into a veritable paean to voluptuousness... This triumph of miniature art is the apotheosis of the vignette" (Ray). Title-page repaired, front free endpaper remargined. Cohen-De Ricci 308-11. Salomons, Eisen pp. 80-1. Ray, French 31. (Inventory #: 166945)