GERMAN. - Lot 25

GERMAN. Le Parfait ouvrage, ou Essai sur la coëffure, translated from the Persian. Césaré, en France : chez tous les Libraires qui vendent de bons livres, 1776. [Followed by:] ANONYMOUS. Testament d'un gentilhomme gascon. [Paris: Jacques Clousier, 1748]. - Two works in one volume, in-8, 176 x 116: frontispiece, 52 pp. ; pp. 3-16. Half brown chagrin, smooth spine decorated with faux nerfs à froid (19th century binding). Very rare first edition of Parfait ouvrage, a polemical work on hair fashion. The author, who claims to be translating a Persian work, introduces himself as Sieur L'Allemand, "coëffeur, nephew of Sieur André, perruquier, breveté du grand Roi de Perse, correspondant du grand Turc, de plusieurs sociétés de coëffeurs, perruquiers, baigneurs, &c." The Goncourt brothers owned a copy of this "flat brochure adorned with a pretty frontispiece", and quoted it in La Femme au XVIIIe siècle and La Maison d'un artiste. The frontispiece in question depicts two cupids in a hairdresser's workshop, transforming a pair of scissors into a bow. This copy contains an equally rare booklet entitled Testament d'un gentilhomme gascon. This is a piquant fictitious testament, a mockery whose salt lies in the discrepancy between the condition of the gentleman, "écuyer [...] demeurant chez Madame Buriquet, fruitière, ruë des Mauvaises-Paroles" and the magnificence of the bequeathed wardrobe. A few extracts were published in the Revue de Gascogne in 1896, based on a communication from Mr. Daignetous, who considered the work "one of the whitebirds of his beautiful aviary". The title page is missing. A good copy of two facéties now almost impossible to find. Spine lightened. Small worm gallery through the first pamphlet, frontispiece reenlarged, paper restoration in the corner of the last leaf, with a few letters in ink.