PBA Galleries

[iv], 187 pp. With 60 illustrations, colored by pochoir, after designs by Robert Bonfils. 4to. Elaborate full mottled calf decoratively blind-stamped throughout, covers with large oval vignette of an 18th-century couple embracing in a park, with small circular vignettes in each corner depicting bucolic scenes, joined by decorative borders, spine lettered in gilt, marbled endpapers, original pictorial blue wrappers bound in; with binder's label of "René Kieffer / Reliures d'Art" on verso of front free endpaper. No. 276 of 500 copies printed on Vélin de Cuve.

Régnier (1864-1936) a leading Symbolist poet and a novelist; he was elected to the Académie Française in 1911. Although apparently never translated into English, it has gone through many French editions and was illustrated by such luminaries as Georges Barbier and Sylvain Sauvage, as well as by Robert Bonfils (1886-1972), a celebrated artist and bookbinder who evolved from the classicist Art Nouveau style of this work to become the epitome of Art Deco. Enigmatic pictorial bookplate of Henry Mottet(?) on front pastedown.