BOOK 1933 SOUVENIRS DE LA GRANDE ARMEE

To be honest , maybe I took your last comments the wrong way.
I think I came across as being rude and it's not my intention.

 

spirited debate of opposing or personal beliefs ....is always welcomed here , in an open and honest manner.

On occasion , it's ok to butt heads ....even forcefully to defend ones position.

 

I didnt mean to be rude either and I hope I made it clear that this, like everything that is written in a forum like this is just a personal opinion. However I have been collecting books for over 20 years, my statements are not based on a bit of googling but on personal experience. Of course not everybody will agree, I am not here to persuade you of anything.

 

I appreciate your knowledge and understand you have invested lots and lots of time in books and you have knowledge that you can't buy or just Google

To be fair, I speak to my dad a few times a week asking him questions and seeking advices on all those books and antiques he decided to give me when he sold his house (I still have 12 unopened boxes of books ranging from 1600 to 1900s) . He has over 50 years experience in collecting old books so he gives me tons of advices as well.

Researching those books one by one is like a Treasure Hunt for me. I love to discover and learn new things.

But I like this forum because 1 person can't know everything and I love to read what people other than my dad have to say.

No bad feelings whatsoever. The advices you gave me were free and I appreciate that.

 

As a dealer, I am interested in unopened books because it's proof they haven't been read - or marked up! Does it affect the value? Not in my experience. It's a hassle to open them, and has to be done carefully, and it can be difficult to explain to the modern reader that it's not a flaw.

As to the limitation, for a while it was common in France (and, to a lesser extent in Britain & the USA) to do a limited edition of a few dozen or maybe 100 copies on fancy paper - Japanese Vellum is a commonly used term for a fine, heavy paper, but there are others - often signed by the author, or maybe illustrated or in a special binding. The 'colophon' is the part of the book that explains this, though not many books have them. A complicated one (and I've seen worse) might say, 'of this book 25 copies were printed on Japan Vellum, each numbered and signed by the author and bound in full leather, reserved for friends of the author & publisher; and 1000 copies on fine hand-made paper, numbered and bound in half-leather, of which 600 are for sale in Great Britain and 400 for sale in America; and 2000 on plain paper, bound in cloth, unnumbered.

In France (and I think most of continental Europe), more than in England, for a long time most books were issued in 'wraps', as this one is, the idea being you would take it to your own binder who would put it in leather to match the rest of your library. Often in the binding process the page edges were trimmed, so the issue of 'opening' the pages was side-stepped, but this DOES lower the value - one used to see listings in book catalogs of desirably untrimmed page edges fetching a premium - sometimes the binder got so carried away as to cut off parts of the text!

 

Hello 2manycats ! Thank you very much for taking the time to post this.

Everything you say makes sense and I have learned a lot from your 2 paragraphs!

I already came across a few of my books that say exactly what you are describing about "IE : 25 copies on a certain paper and 500 on another." so that helps me understand that part as well.

It makes sense too about the "wraps". I thought this book was just made like this but now I understand .

I have been researching and collecting antiques for years but my passion is/was mostly porcelain figurines and trinkets. Books are totally new to me and I am learning as I go. I have so much more to learn I can see that ! But that's the good part. I love the learning process too lol.

Thanks again and have a great evening!