MOUSTALON (pseud.?); [François-Alexandre Pierre de GARSAULT]. Encyclopédie des jeunes gens ou memorial raisonné de ce qu'il y a d'utile et d'intéressant dans les connaissances humaines … nouvelle edition.

Adapted for Post-Revolution Pupils

MOUSTALON (pseud.?); [François-Alexandre Pierre de GARSAULT]. Encyclopédie des jeunes gens ou memorial raisonné de ce qu'il y a d'utile et d'intéressant dans les connaissances humaines … nouvelle edition. Paris: Librairie Economique. 1807.

Two volumes, 8vo. Contemporary French calf-backed boards with brown paste-paper sides, flat spines richly gilt in compartments, gilt red morocco lettering- and numbering-pieces; vol. I: pp. iii-viii, 512; vol. II: pp. [2], 548; 18 copper-engraved plates (i.e. 17: folding pl. to vol. I counted twice), 6 copper-engraved folding maps; seemingly bound without half-titles; joints lightly rubbed, hinges cracked, corners lightly bumped, light spotting to top- and fore-edges; sporadic light foxing as usual, all plates and maps in remarkably crisp state, a few small paperflaws to corners not affecting text, vol. I front free endpaper partially detached, some staining to vol. I, p. 453; nonetheless a very good set; near-contemporary booklabel ‘M. Dutillet’ to front pastedowns.

Rare first edition thus – heavily revised, expanded, and attractively illustrated with engraved maps and plates, of this encyclopaedia for young readers of both sexes, an almost unrecognisable reworking of Garsault’s 1761 Notionaire ou memorial raisonné

French educator Moustalon, author of the 1786 pedagogical work Lycée de la jeunesse, ou les études réparées, heavily reworked and expanded Garsault’s Notionaire from a single volume of 736 pages to two volumes comprising over a thousand pages. His adaptation of the Notionaire was first published in 1805 under its original title; this is the first edition to appear under the title Encyclopédie des jeunes gens.

In his preface, Moustalon notes that the project had been suggested to him in 1790 by a Parisian bookseller who had retained the plates used for Garsault’s Notaire. He envisions the present work as a natural sequel to his Lycée, supplemented by knowledge obtained in his thirty years of teaching experience and intended to ‘be of service to young people, and especially to those whom the Revolution prevented from receiving an education, the need for which is felt today more than ever’ (trans.).

The work comprises a wealth of information covering a wide range of subjects, including arithmetic; magic, superstition, and divination; printing (including typesetting, composition, and stereotype and polytype processes); the Abrahamic religions; astronomy; philosophy; medicine (anatomy, surgery, and apothecary, with a section on cowpox and vaccines developed only a decade earlier); heraldry; mineralogy; zoology; history (including classical); government and a large section on world geography, including a Mappa Mundi, two world maps, and maps of Europe, Asia, Africa, Central America, and North America.

Although Moustalon ‘omits certain entries he deems less relevant for the students of his day – notably the richly illustrated chapters on music and games – his primary task is to expand and update Garsault’s texts […] It is specifically the school subjects of geography and natural history – the latter formed by merging and enriching a set of Garsault’s entries on minerals, shells, animals, and plants – that undergo significant expansion, occupying 240 and 210 pages respectively. The resulting work reflects a hybrid approach: it retains Garsault’s formatting – consciously emulated for passages and plates carried over verbatim – yet adopts a more linear layout […] driven more by the flow of speech than by the spatial arrangement and interplay of graphic and typographic elements’ (Kovacs, trans.).

OCLC finds a handful of copies in continental Europe and only one in the US, at the Newberry; no copies traced in the UK.

See Kovacs, ‘*L’image scientifique et ses recontextualisations: du Notionaire de Garsault (1761) à l’Encyclopédie des jeunes gens (1807) de Moustalon’, in Spirale 40 (2007), pp. 9–25.

SKU: 2119410