DIETZSCH, Barbara Regina (1706-83). Collection d'Oiseaux pour la plupart d'Allemagne peints par Mademoiselle Barbe Régine Dietsch: gravés et publiés par Adam Louis Wirsing décrits par Benoit Chrètian Vogel ... premier cahier. Nuremberg: Adam Louis Wirsing, 1782.

DIETZSCH, Barbara Regina (1706-83). Collection d'Oiseaux pour la plupart d'Allemagne peints par Mademoiselle Barbe Régine Dietsch: gravés et publiés par Adam Louis Wirsing décrits par Benoit Chrètian Vogel ... premier cahier. Nuremberg: Adam Louis Wirsing, 1782.

2° (420 x 260 mm). Text in French. 6pp. preface by Vogel, text A-P2 only, 106 hand-coloured engraved plates by Wirsing (of ?108), many heightened with gum arabic, most plates with early 19th-century pencil annotations noting the English name of the bird. Early 19th-century mottled calf gilt, covers with roll-tooled floral borders, central arms of Beriah Botfield, spine flat with red morocco onlays, panels decorated with bird tools, gilt turn-ins, marbled edges (small cracks at joints).

A RARE UNRECORDED ISSUE IN FRENCH of Barbara Dietzsch's 'Sammlung meistens deutscher Voegel', issued by the heirs of the engraver Adam Wirsing. This copy has the title to the first part and text to the first 25 plates. The first edition of this unusual work was published in Nuremberg 1772-77. Standard bibliographies make no reference to this French edition which must be considered of the greatest rarity. Of the 1772 German edition, copies with a total of 108 plates are practically unknown, and for that edition Fine Bird Books noted that "a copy with 50 plates must, from a collectors point of view, be considered complete", the most complete copy, the Furstenberg example, had only 105 plates. Adam Wirsing was the publisher of the 1772 edition, and this edition was most probably assembled by his heirs from plates available from 1772 with newly set titles and text. In 1800, 38 plates were issued without text by J.M. Bechstein of Nuremberg. For the 1772 edition cf. Fine Bird Books 70; Nissen IVB 246; Yale/Ripley 78; not in Ayer, Wood or Anker.