ATLAS. -JAILLOT (Alexis-Hubert). Atlas françois, contenant l - Lot 209

ATLAS. -JAILLOT (Alexis-Hubert). Atlas françois, contenant les cartes géographiques dans lesquelles sont très exactement remarquez les Empires, monarchies, royaumes et Estats de l'Europe, de l'Asie, de l'Afrique et de l'Amérique. ÀParis, chez le SrJaillot, 1695. Large folio, 2ff. printed, granite-brown calf, spine ribbed with partitions and fleurons with garnet-red title-pieces and tomaison, red edges; worn bindings with restorations, marginal wetness on all plates but affecting only a dozen of them in vol.II, the same dozen with a marginal ink stain; a few wormholes in the margins of the plates in vol.II (period binding). Collection of 149 (out of 151) copper-engraved plates hors texte, comprising: 3 single plates (a portrait and a title repeated at the head of the 2 volumes), and 146 (out of 148) double-page plates mounted on tabs, enhanced with color. These double-page plates include 20 "geographical tables", and 126 (out of 128) maps, mostly by Jaillot himself, but about a third copied in reduction from the Sanson map. The Atlas françois "presents a major bibliographical difficulty: its contents vary from one copy to another" (Mireille Pastoureau, LesAtlas français, xvie-xviie siècles, p.262). The present copy, titled with the first date (there are others with titles dated 1698 or 1700), includes a printed Catalogue des cartes et tables which assigns serial numbers to the plates (although these numbers do not appear on the engravings themselves), from 1 to 64 in the first volume, and from 1 to 85 in the second, but the numbering is not regular: in the first volume, it jumps from 56 to 63, plate no. 29 is engraved in 2 sheets listed under the same number, plate no. 66 in 6 sheets listed under the same number; in the second volume, the numbering of the plates jumps from 61 to 63. The collation of the present copy conforms to this "catalog", with the exception of plates 30 and 31 of the first volume (maps of the bishopric of Meaux), which are missing.