FINE COPPER PLATE ENGRAVINGS. Tableau Encyclopedique et Methodique des Trois Regnes de la Nature. Ichthyologie

Paris: Panckoucke, 1788. First edition.

1788 ATLAS OF FISH WITH 102 FINE COPPER PLATE ENGRAVINGS BY FRENCH PRIEST-NATURALIST WHO DESCRIBED 25 NEW SPECIES OF FISH AND THE FIRST TO STUDY THE WILD CHILD OF AVEYRON.

Two hardcover volumes 12 3/4 inches tall, recent green cloth covered boards with leather spines and gilt titles, new endpapers, bookplate of Robert L. Chevalier to front paste-down, pages uncut, Vol. I, lvi, 215 pp; Vol. II, 102 copper plate engravings numbered A, B, and 1 - 100. Bindings fine, Vol. I with light foxing to first pages, wormholes top corner of 5 leaves (pages 1-10) not affecting text; Vol. II with light browning/foxing to margins of plates engraved by Robert Benard. Overall very good.

ABBE PIERRE JOSEPH PONNATERRE (1752-1804) was a French naturalist who contributed sections on cetaceans, mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and insects to the Tableau Encyclopédique et Méthodique. Bonnaterre is credited with identifying about 25 new species of fish, and assembled illustrations of about 400 in his atlas offered here. He is also notable as the first scientist to study the feral child Victor of Aveyron.

ROBERT BENARD (1734-1785) was a prominent French engraver who contributed many plates for the Encyclopédie by Diderot & d'Alembert and for the publications of Panckoucke. CHARLES-JOSEPH PANCKOUCKE (1736 – 1798) was responsible for numerous influential publications of the era, including the literary journal Mercure de France and the Encyclopédie Méthodique, an expansion and rearrangement of the Encyclopédie, with the subject matter organized by subject area rather than alphabetically. He received the license in 1780, and published a first prospectus in 1782. The work outlived him, with his daughter Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse (widow of Panckoucke's partner Henri Agasse) publishing the last of 166 volumes in 1832.