Rare books, manuscripts and ephemera from five centuries

Easy. Cheap. Diverting.

 

[BLOCQUEL, Madame]. ART DE CONFECTIONNER LES FLEURS ARTIFICIELLES. Édition ornée de figures et dédiée aux dames. Par M.me Bl•••. A Paris: chez Delarue. Lille, chez Blocquel, c.1850? £350

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8vo, pp. 272, [32], [15] advertisements, [1] blank; with one full-page lithograph plate after p.66, 25 lithograph plates, of which 7 are double-page, after p. 256, and 31 further full-page lithographs included in pagination, as well as lithographed head- and tailpieces and initials throughout; occasional spotting but largely clean and fresh; uncut and entirely unopened in the original publisher’s blue printed wrappers; a few tears to extremities, and slightly sunned, but still a very fresh copy.

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Revised and expanded edition of this lovely guide to the making of artificial flowers, printed by Castiaux in Lille and seemingly written by Mme Blocquel, wife of the prolific Lille bookseller and publisher.

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The volume consists of a text introduction, explaining both the principles of floristry and the materials required for making artificial flowers, the terminology used, and the techniques to be employed: the practice itself, as the avertissement tells us, is ‘au nombre des travaux destinés à charmer les loisirs des Dames ou des Desmoiselles... comme le plus agréable, le moins couteux et l’un des plus faciles’. There then follows a set of patterns for different flowers, all with texts giving both botanical and horticultural information and instructions on how to reproduce them, and an advertisement for the Fabrique et Magasin d’Apprêts pour Fleurs in Lille, where one will find everything necessary for making artificial flowers; the book concludes with more supplementary designs. 

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Musa’s entry does not give much to go on with regard to the priority of editions, beyond noting that it appeared in the Blocquel catalogue for 1813; other editions we have seen tend to specify ‘nouvelle édition’ on the title-page. 

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Bernard Musa, Histoire d’un Imprimeur Lillois Simon-François Blocquel 1780-1863, Lille, Vauban 2006, no. 1435 for first edition; OCLC records copies at Delaware, Winterthur, Atlanta History Center, the V&A, the Library of Congress, and the Musée d’art et d’histoire in Fribourg. 

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