MANUSCRIPT. — Collection of Selected Airs. No place, no date - Lot 102

MANUSCRIPT. — Collection of Selected Airs. No place, no date [18th century]. 5 in-8 volumes of 125 (108 + 17), 221 (208 + 13), 122 (109 + 13), 118 (108 + 10), and 124 (118 + 6) pages, red morocco leather, gilt fillet and floral motifs at the corners, spine decorated with small metal filigree, inner roulette, lining and endpapers of gilt-patterned paper, gilt edges on marbled paper (contemporary binding). A charming 18th-century manuscript collection containing approximately 250 tunes and songs about love and wine in particular, some of which are quite lighthearted: playful songs, brunettes, minuets, tender tunes, duets, sarabandes, etc. Examples include a “Drinking Duet,” “Love the Cook,” a song about the downy hair curling beneath a shirt, or this vaudeville: My husband is an old owl [...] to get even with him, I’ve got a lover whose d*ck is always hard—that really gets me going (Volume I, pp. 102–103). Each volume opens with a title set within a frame painted in color and adorned with a hand-drawn and colored floral arrangement, and concludes with a carefully laid-out table of contents. Lyrics and musical notation are set within a triple black ink border. This copy bears an engraved bookplate reading “Louise Adélaïde de Bourbon”: despite the presence of this bookplate, it seems unlikely that such a collection could have belonged to this abbess (1754–1824), founder of the Benedictine community on Rue Monsieur. Two songs written in another hand on 6 pages at the beginning of the first volume and at the end of the fifth. The ink has bled through the paper on a few pages, but this is not a serious issue.

Estimation:€2,000

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