I own a copy of “L’Art de la Verrerie” by Édouard Gerspach (, published in 1885 by Maison Quantin (Paris).
When published in 1885 it represented one of the most comprehensive French treatments of the history of glass, combining archaeology, art history, manufacturing techniques and contemporary industry.
It formed part of Quantin’s prestigious “Bibliothèque de l’enseignement des Beaux-Arts“. Quantin commissioned leading specialists to produce authoritative surveys of the decorative arts. The inclusion of L’Art de la Verrerie in this series shows that it was intended as a serious scholarly work rather than a popular book.
Édouard-Zacharie Gerspach was a civil servant in l’administration des Beaux-Arts français and director of the Gobelins Manufactory. This was a royal factory supplying the court of the French monarchs with carpets and tapestry. The factory remains in operation as a state-run institution. Before that he was director of the Sèvres National Porcelain Manufactory.
Gerspach was already a respected art historian, having written on mosaics, tapestries and the Gobelins manufactory. And in this book he is interested not only in artistic glass but also in furnaces, raw materials, colouring, engraving and industrial production, making it useful to historians of technology as well as decorative arts.
Description
Original cloth. 320 pp.; gilt titles; 152 illustrations/figures. One octavo volume, ln-8 (21 × 14 cm). Text in French. Paper browned, with no brown spots, but some minor wear to the cover.
The mention “in-8” is a traditional book format produced by folding a printer’s sheet three times to create 8 leaves (16 pages).
On the front cover its mentioned Lycée de Reims, Devoirs de Vacances. This was almost certainly a special publisher’s or binder’s edition made for the Lycée de Reims, which was (and still is) one of the important French lycées. It would appear to have been summer holiday reading (devoirs de vacances).
