Idées d’Un Militaire Pour la disposition des Troupes Confiées aux Jeunes Officiers dans la Défense et l’Attaque des Petits Postes

Paris: Chez Alexandre Jombert, Jeune, 1783. First Edition. Hardcover. Marbled paper pastedown. Clamshell box is quarter calf. Cloth on its boards. 6. Near Fine. An exquisitely handsome suite of maps, all with contemporary hand-coloring, depicting military maneuvers, but the beauty of these maps transcends the original purpose. Eleven maps in all, they were removed from the book, where they had been bound in together as its final leaves, and backed with canvas, giving them more stability and allowing for their easy display as framed wall hangings, but here housed in the most unusual custom clamshell box created to also store the book proper. Folio. 32 (truncated) by 24 cm. [10 -- half title, title, dedication, preface], 116, 60, [25] pp. With eleven maps now separate from the book. All but one these were originally folding, and these ten are 39.5 by 24 cm, with the tabs used to bind them in the book preserved and now backed with the same canvas as the rest of the maps, but not counted in our measurement. The non-folding map is 26 by 21 cm. The book itself has one hand-colored headpiece, on the first page of the dedication, and this is a large trophy or armorial vignette. The leaves of the book are of a heavy-ish linen , stock, and all edges of the leaves are deckled. The outer clamshell box measures 46.5 by 40 cm, and it is 6.5 cm thick. The book rests, or one could accurately say, nests, in a well created at its base, with substantial walls surrounding it. The maps are stored in a portfolio of sorts, with the same red cloth covering its exterior and the sides or walls between which the maps are placed, and a moire paper lines the map's well or depression. The map portfolio covers the book well as well, serving as a sort of interior lid. The book's leaves are generally clean, with minor light foxing and other insignificant staining. Contemporary pastedown of binding is sunned on spine to point of obscuring pattern. Scuffs and stains affecting the binding generally, but it remains still an attractive binding. Ownership bookplate on FEP has a Pre-Raphaelite style drawing. The maps are also mostly clean. The last map, the only non-folding map, has a narrow band of soiling along its lower margin, and one can find scattered marginal soil on this and the other maps' margins. The non-folding map has two coal-ish swirls on the map proper. We aren't sure whether these were intentional or later stains -- we tend to think the former, though. The clamshell case has some scuffing of its exterior, but is structurally sound as can be. (Inventory #: 20010)