I saw Sébastien for the first time last year. Indeed, I fell in love with the beauty of his engravings on viewing his Pratique de la geométrie (Amsterdam: Pierre Mortier, 1691). Although this is a geometry textbook, with plates to illustrate concepts and theorems, my Sébastien added beautiful views and figures to every one of the 80 plates. How can one resist this need to add superfluous beauty to a text book?

Sébastien Le Clerc (1637-1714) was a celebrated French engraver, with expertise in military architecture, geometry and perspective. He made prints, illustrated books, and wrote popular books on geometry and architecture. Géométrie Pratique was translated and reprinted for decades: RBML holds five French editions (from an incomplete first ed., 1668 to a 1764 version “a l’usage des artistes”); four editions in English; and two in Italian. Just this week, I opened the package with the English edition of 1727, bought from a catalog. I wanted to see the plates – did the English printers acquire Sébastien’s own plates? Would they be hideous English substitutes?

 

 

It turns out they are decent copies of the originals. Definitely copies: you can see that the English etcher had Le Clerc’s prints in front of him and copied them as he saw them, so that when the plate was printed, the picture – including the mathematical diagrams – were reversed (he did get the letters to read correctly). The copied etchings aren’t bad, though maybe not as fine as Le Clerc’s. What does surprise me is that the letterpress printing in the volume also closely mimics the French original, and if anything, the English printing is more accomplished than the French.

The Avery Library has also found that it does not have enough Le Clerc, and has just recently added a volume which includes several suites of prints of architectural views to its collection. It is a beautiful thing to page through – I highly recommend a visit to see it!