DE LA TOURRETTE, Marc Antoine Louis Claret de Fleurieu. Démonstrations élémentaires de botanique.: Lyon, Chez Jean-Marie Bruyset, Imprimeur-Libraire, 1766
(200 x 130mm) pp.xvi, 272, xxv, 8 planches (fold out tables illustrating botanic specimens). Printed on laid paper with minor head and end peice decorations throughout. Full calf binding, with 5 sewing stations with interpanel gilt decoration, two of which are red spine labels. Marbled front flyleaf and pastedown (absent in back). Decorated foredges using what appears to be paste paper technique. Two ownership marks, one on verso of fly leaf, the other on verso of half title. Hinges splitting, corners bumped. Somewhat soiled on backfly leaf and pastedown, with single evidence of worming, primarily effecting back stubs and minimally into the book body itself. Overall, for age, GOOD condition.
This book, printed in Lyon, demonstrates the important contributions of the Lyonais botanist, Marc Antoine Louis Claret de La Tourrette. The owner of the book seems to have taken great pride in the celebrated botanists of Lyon.
On the verso of the half title page, in a beautiful 18th century hand, this former owner has written in Latin that:
"Author of this book is the most esteemed Latourette, Frenchman and Lyonais (from Lyon), with the celebrated Abbot Rosier, gardern, scholar, veternarian, Lyonais, director, medical doctor, in order to see is in ? the system of European plants of Linnaeus, edited by the most esteemed Lord Gilibert, Medical doctor, botanist, professor, Provice of Lyon, for epidemics, proto-medical etc. etc. From the colony of Allobroges, 1785."
The owner tips his hat to his wide breadth of education by including the reference to the Allobroges, a Gallic tribe which occupied the area around Lyon and Geneva, famously written about in Caesar's De Bello Gallico.
An ownership mark that appears on the verso of the front flyleaf further celebrates this Lyonais printing, by simply penning in "Lovanni 1786" followed by a mysterious "9-0-0" and possible last name.