Collection of 41 works on demography, bound by Bertillon and presented to a close family member and colleague.

BERTILLON, Louis-Adolphe, and others.

Edité par 1855-78

A propos de cet article

A personal selection of articles by the pioneering demographer and anthropologist, inscribed to his niece Jeanne on the initial blank of Volume I, "à ma chère fillette et collaboratrice Jeanne Bertillon. 1880. A. Bertillon", and with a similar inscription in Volume II. The second volume includes five leaves of manuscript notes, while several works bear his pencil annotations. The works collected here, a range of offprints and journal extracts, largely revolve around Bertillon's efforts to use statistical analysis in investigating premature mortality. The articles in Volume I cover more general demographic theories, including comparative mortality, population tables, and cranial analysis, while those in Volume II are more restricted studies of individual countries, continents, and cities, including America, Australia, and Finland. Many are essays contributed to Dechambre's Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences médicales. In Volume II, the Dictionnaire encyclopédique article on Austria is accompanied by four leaves of manuscript notes recording population information on Austrian provinces, while the fifth is tipped in to a later article on Great Britain and assesses the median age of the British population following the 1861 census. By 1876, Bertillon (1821-1883) was a professor at the school of anthropology in Paris; a year later he was among the first contributors to the new Annales de Démographie internationale journal (offprints of two of his articles, on population movement, and on the demographics of the Seine-Inférieure, are included in Volume II). In 1878, he chaired the World Congress of Demography in Paris, and two years later he was appointed head of the Parisian Bureau of Statistics. The historian Elizabeth A. Williams has noted that he "showed a remarkable perspicacity in figuring out a large part of the principal demographic problems" (quoted in Hecht, p. 151). Following the death of his wife in 1866, Bertillon persuaded several of his female relatives to manage his household and assist with the many graphs and tables in his works. Unlike another of his relative-assistants, Jeanne Bertillon (1874-1921) didn't bill her uncle for her services, which may explain the warmth of the presentation inscription here. The volumes also include one work by Broca, a close friend of the Bertillons, and two Dictionnaire encyclopédique entries by Louis-Adolphe's son Jacques (1851-1922), himself a respected statistician and an influence on Durkheim. The botanist Achille Guillard (1799-1876), Louis-Adolphe's father-in-law and coiner of the term "demography", also authored or co-authored four of the works in Volume II. A full breakdown of the contents is available on request. Jennifer Michael Hecht, The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology in France, 2006. Together, 41 works bound in 2 vols, large octavo (238 x 151 mm), individual works from 238 x 175 mm to 219 x 137 mm. With 2 plates (1 folding), extensive tables and graphs in the text, many full-page (2 folding). C.1880 red quarter morocco, spines ruled in blind and lettered in gilt, marbled paper sides and endpapers, green silk bookmarkers. Light wear, slight cockling to covers, minor foxing to otherwise crisp contents, infrequent browning and a couple of short closed tears to inner margins of plates: a very good copy indeed.

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Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: Collection of 41 works on demography, bound by Bertillon and presented to a close family member and colleague.
• Éditeur: 1855-78