Details
ALMANACK -- La Gamelle Patriotique, Almanach Chantant, pourl'an IIe. De la République Française une et indivisible. Paris: Langlois for Barba & Dien, An 2 [1793-1794]. 12° (69 x 66mm). Hand-coloured engraved frontispiece of two revolutionary figures tucking into the eponymous mess tin (lacking 1 leaf, pp.55-56, occasional light browning and soiling, some gentle creasing). Original decorative paper wrappers, (a little worn at spine, lightly soiled).
EXTREMELY RARE SURVIVAL of this ephemeral publication promoting the new Republican calendar with revolutionary songs. Almanacs had long been a staple of the French publishing trade, growing steadily in popularity and output during the 18th-century. Lise Andries in Revolution in Print: The Press in France, 1775-1800, Berkeley: 1989, has shown how this traditional genre was adapted to revolutionary circumstances and aims: 'the almanac was used for the first time as propaganda systematically and on a large scale. Although the traditional almanac prevailed throughout the revolutionary period as a whole, political almanacs constituted 73 percent of the production of the genre during the Terror, from 1793 to 1795' (p. 210). With the French Revolution came deregulation of the French printing trade, and '1789 marked a boom in the production of ephemeral literature (e.g., pamphlets, songsheets, and almanacs) and periodical literature, and an explosion in the number of presses producing for a new market amounting to something like a four-fold increase in the number of printers over the course of the Revolution and a tripling of the number of booksellers and/or publishers' (Joan B. Landes, 'More than Words: the Printing Press and the French Revolution' in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Autumn, 1991), pp.90). It is therefore extraordinary that the present work, truly representative of this new Republican genre, should be APPARENTLY UNRECORDED, with no copies traced in Bibliothèque nationale de France nor in Catalogue collectif de France.
EXTREMELY RARE SURVIVAL of this ephemeral publication promoting the new Republican calendar with revolutionary songs. Almanacs had long been a staple of the French publishing trade, growing steadily in popularity and output during the 18th-century. Lise Andries in Revolution in Print: The Press in France, 1775-1800, Berkeley: 1989, has shown how this traditional genre was adapted to revolutionary circumstances and aims: 'the almanac was used for the first time as propaganda systematically and on a large scale. Although the traditional almanac prevailed throughout the revolutionary period as a whole, political almanacs constituted 73 percent of the production of the genre during the Terror, from 1793 to 1795' (p. 210). With the French Revolution came deregulation of the French printing trade, and '1789 marked a boom in the production of ephemeral literature (e.g., pamphlets, songsheets, and almanacs) and periodical literature, and an explosion in the number of presses producing for a new market amounting to something like a four-fold increase in the number of printers over the course of the Revolution and a tripling of the number of booksellers and/or publishers' (Joan B. Landes, 'More than Words: the Printing Press and the French Revolution' in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Autumn, 1991), pp.90). It is therefore extraordinary that the present work, truly representative of this new Republican genre, should be APPARENTLY UNRECORDED, with no copies traced in Bibliothèque nationale de France nor in Catalogue collectif de France.
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