Petit Dictionnaire Critique et Anecdotique des Enseignes de Paris, Par un Batteur de Pavés. Paris: (Imprimerie de H. Balzac for) les Marchands de Nouveautés, 1826.
16mo (109 x 69 mm). 160 pages. Woodcut scale vignette on title (explained in the final entry). (Repaired tear through 3 lines of p. 63, not affecting legibility; tiny wormholes in half-title and title). Original pink printed wrappers, untrimmed (skillfully recased); preserved in a morocco-backed hard chemise and slipcase. ***
First edition of a humorous annotated list of Parisian commercial signs and signboards, printed by Balzac.
Arranged by business names rather than type of trade, the over two hundred entries contain witty commentaries on the names and imagery of the signs, the psychological (or “marketing”) techniques their creators employed, the shops or studios themselves, and/or their owners. Included are many restaurants, traiteurs, confiseurs, etc., and dozens of wine merchants, as well as clothiers, milliners, armorers, cobblers, clockmakers, goldsmiths, jewelers, hardware stores, hairdressers, haberdashers, wigmakers, linen merchants, midwives, manufacturers of wallpaper, church ornaments, theater decoration, upholstery ... and dozens of marchands de nouveautés: bookstores selling the latest journals and books. The names are creative and usually unrelated to the nature of the businesses (opening at random, one finds, for example, Le Petit Petro, a haberdasher, À Pygmalion, a marchand de nouveautés, Le Pilote, a hardware store, and Au Polichinelle Vampire, more nouveautés).
During his twenties Balzac tried several business ventures, all of which failed, including attempts at publishing, printing, and type-founding. From 1826 to 1828 his printshop employed a foreman, the typographer André Barbier, and 36 workers; in these two years he printed over 160 separate books, journals, and ephemeral sheets or pamphlets (counts differ; Hanotaux & Vicaire list 163 imprints; the Bibliographie de France lists 168).
Long thought to be the work of Balzac himself, the text was in fact compiled by Brismontier, author of a variety of specialized “dictionaries,” including a Dictionnaire de Chimie and a Dictionnaire des gens de lettres vivants.
Some copies of the half-title contain a typo (”fnseignes”), corrected here. OCLC locates 7 copies in the US (Morgan, NYPL, Harvard, Indiana, U Mass Amherst, Washington U, Princeton). Talvart & Place, Bibliographie des auteurs modernes de langue francaise I:147; Barbier, Anonymes III, 842-843; Hanotaux & Vicaire, La Jeunesse de Balzac: Balzac imprimeur (1903) n° 8 (p. 228); Carteret, Trésor du bibliophile romantique et moderne I, 54. Vicaire, Manuel de l'amateur de livres du XIXe siècle I, 179; cf. B. R. Tolley, “Balzac the printer,” French Studies 13 (1959), no. 3: 214-225. Item #4482
Price: $1,750.00