DESNOS, Louis-Charles. Etrennes utiles et nécessaires aux commercans et voyageurs ou indicateur fidèle enseignant toutes les routes royales et particulières de la France, et les chemins de communication qui traversent les grandes routes … dédiées au Roi … Paris: [Louis-Charles] Desnos. 1777.
24mo. Contemporary red morocco, borders roll-tooled in gilt, flat spine richly gilt in compartments, green gilt morocco lettering-piece, edges gilt, turn-ins roll-tooled in gilt, blue silk place-marker (detached); ff. [iv], 176, 47 (index), [1], comprising comprising 156 maps in pagination, bound without preliminary map of Paris; frontispiece copper-engraved and titled ‘Routes de France’, contemporary hand-colouring in blue, green, and red, part-title to index; lower edge of rear board chipped and worn; old repair to front free endpaper verso at head, sporadic light toning and and spotting, a few small pale dampstains; else a very good copy; faint contemporary ownership inscription to title, early ownership inscriptions ‘William Waters’ and ‘W. Waters, 7 Curzon St, Mayfair’ to front flyleaf, nineteenth-century armorial bookplate of Cornelius Walford, F.S.S. to front free endpaper verso (engraved by Harry Soane, Franks 30564).
Extremely rare edition of this guidebook of maps for merchants and travellers in France and surrounding countries, another issue of which would be used by Thomas Jefferson on his 1787 tour as United States Minister to France, our copy from the library of a founding committee member of the London Topographical Society.
Geographer Louis-Charles Desnos (1725–1805), self-styled in the imprint as ‘geographical engineer and bookseller to His Danish Majesty’ (trans.), was a prolific printer of almanacks as well as Royal Globemaker to Christian VII of Denmark (for which he received an annual stipend of five hundred livres), and in 1768 published the first edition of his Étrennes utiles, under the title Almanach de l’indicateur fidèle, with revised editions in 1771 (Étrennes pour l’année 1771, ou petit indicateur fidèle, 24mo) and 1777 (the present edition), resissued several times until 1793. The Library of Congress holds a copy of the Étrennes utiles (the publication date erased), presented by Jefferson’s daughter, Martha Randolph, with the recipient’s inscription that ‘this Itineraire … was the travelling guide which Mr. Jefferson took with him in the tour he made in the south of France & the north of Italy in the year 1787’.
The present work provides numerous maps illustrating journeys within France (from Paris to Lyon, Strasbourg, Rouen, Caen, etc.), as well as to Flanders, Germany, Netherlands, Austria, and England. The map to p. 81 shows the route from London to Newhaven in Sussex, with stops along the way at Croydon, ‘Piddino’ (Piddenhoe), ‘Radmel’ (Rodmell), and East Grinstead (in the index called ‘Eastgrimpstead’). Also included are routes from London to Portsmouth (p. 82), and a map of south-east London and Kent (p. 69).
Provenance:
1. Early nineteenth-century ownership inscriptions of William Waters of Curzon St to front flyleaf.
2. With the bookplate of the barrister and author of the *Insurance Cyclopædia* Cornelius Walford (1827–1885). Walford was a member of the Archaeological Society, the Royal Historical Society, the Statistical Society, and the Sette of Odd Volumes, as well as a founding committee member of the London Topographical Society, established in 1880. It was Walford who set out the Topographical Society’s aim as ‘the reproduction of maps, drawings, and charts of London … This work no other Society has attempted to accomplish’ (London Topographical Society, online).
We find no copies of the 1777 edition on OCLC, or Library Hub. CCfr records a single copy, in La Ferté-Macé in Normandy.
Grand-Carteret 581 (see also 405n).
SKU: 2123418