Chardin's Voyages en Perse...

CHARDIN, Mr. Le Chevalier [Jean] (1643-1713).
Voyages en Perse, et autres lieux de l'Orient. Enrichi d'un grand nombre de belles Figures en Taille-douce, representant les Antiquitez & les Choses remarquables du Pays.
Paris: Gabriel Amaulry, 1723. First Paris edition; second edition.

Comparables: Sotheby's, 2021 - EUR 20,160; Pierre Berge & Associes, 2019 - EUR 8,846.

Duodecimo (6 3/8" x 3 11/16", 162mm x 94mm). Title-pages in red-and-black. With 81 plates: an engraved portrait frontispiece, 3 folding two-leaf letterpress tables and 77 engraved plates, of which 30 are folding. The edition is sufficiently rare that no copy has been found for collation. Bound in contemporary red morocco. On the boards, a triple gilt fillet border with gilt bull's-eyes at the corners. Central (effaced, but once gilt) supralibros with a cipher surmounted by a ducal coronet. On the spine, five raised bands with dashed gilt roll. In the panels, a field of gilt scrollwork with gilt annulets. Title gilt to black morocco on the second panel. Number gilt to black morocco in the third panel. Dashed gilt roll to head- and tail-pieces. On the edges of the boards, a single gilt fillet. Gilt inside dentelle. Marbled end-papers. All edges of the text-block gilt; concealed marbling to the fore and bottom-edges. With two silk marking ribbons: orange and turquoise. The supralibros of each volume have been effaced, doubtless during the Revolution. A very little rubbing to the extremities, with little patches of wear to the fore-corners of voll. II, IV and VII. In vol. VII, preface mis-bound after the first two quires. Internally quite fresh, with the most occasional light foxing. Excellent margins, with several preserved fore-deckles and 25mm or more preserved at the lower edge. An utterly lovely set, the very picture of benign neglect.

Jean Chardin (1643-1713) was a jeweler's son who first arrived in Persia in 1666, sojourned to India and returned to Paris in 1669; he returned and stayed from 1673 to 1677. There Shah Abbas II made him his agent for purchasing jewels; after Abbas's death he was embedded in the court of Suleiman I, having been present at his coronation. This gave him not only access to the highest circles of Persian society but also to the country and its monuments. Shortly after his return to France he fled, as he was Huguenot, to England, where he was made court jeweler and knighted by Charles II (such that he is known sometimes as Sir John Chardin). He was sent eventually as a trade agent to Holland, and so the first complete edition (early portions appeared as early as 1686) was published in Amsterdam in 1711 (as a quarto and as a duodecimo, as here; Brunet dismisses the 1723 editions as "mal executee," though clearly he never saw our magnificent copy). Although French travelers had been in Iran from the beginning of the XVIIc (Henri de Feynes passed through en route to China), Chardin's account is easily the most complete of the period. He also learned Persian, and so his explorations of texts (including several plates of facsimile text in vol. IX) are important integrations of primary Persian (including Avestan) source material into the Western scholarly world. His curiosity, true of the best travelers, was essentially boundless. History and modernity commingle, customs and manners as much the subject of his inquiry as the number of houses in a particular town or the nature of Persian religion or literature or music. Indeed, the Voyages is encyclopedic rather than plainly narrative. The set is rather exquisite, from its restrained integration of arabesques to the spine to the concealed edge-marbling of the text-block. The effacing of the supralibros is rather a shame, if at least a confirmation that the set was bound before the Revolution. The coronet is a duke's, the cipher based perhaps on the letter L; more than that one cannot say.