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AN EXCEPTIONALLY VIBRANTLY-COLORED COPY IN A FINE CONTEMPORARY BINDING First French editions (see below). Six volumes. Quarto (9 7/8" x 7 7/8", 250mm x 199mm). Collated complete (including the c2 blank of part 6) with 190 engraved colored plates. [Full collation available.] Bound in contemporary cat's-paw calf, with a double gilt-fillet border to the boards. On the spines, five raised bands with a gilt roll. Panels gilt. Title gilt to black in the second panel, number gilt to black in the third panel. Edges of the boards gilt, continuing to the inside dentelle gilt. Blue, yellow and red end-papers. All edges of the text-block gilt. Green silk marking ribbons. An exceptionally sharp set, complete with 6 engraved colored titles and 190 engraved colored plates. With some superficial chipping and flaking to the extremities, and some wear to the fore-corners. Headpiece of vol. VI perished, but otherwise beautifully intact with headbands. Title-page of vol. I has been altered (see below). A few instances of foxing, but always quite minor. Some of the pigments on the plates have tanned through to the back. A brilliantly bright suite of plates.The greatest eighteenth-century work of conchology, Knorr's Delices (a German edition, Vergnügen der Augen und des Gemüths, began publication in 1757) gathers together the specimens of the Wunderkammern of Nuremberg, Amsterdam and beyond. The descriptions - there was a contemporaneous Latin edition, and a later Dutch edition - are unusually descriptive and readable, and not, as so often, truncated and terse. Still, nothing lacks in precision; vol. VI includes a concordance to Rumpf, who came to supplant Linnæus as the authority on mollusks. Knorr died in 1761, and so the introduction to each part but the first is signed by his heirs. Perhaps this is the reason that the title-page is sometimes found bearing the year 1760 and sometimes 1764; his death may well have delayed publication of the first volume. The present copy bears the 1760 date (as observation of the reverse of the title-page of vol. I easily shows), but a small disc of paper has been pasted over the 0, altering it to a 4. The glory of this copy is the unusual vibrancy of its plates' coloring. The colorist has has gone to the very extremes of her palette, supplying the warmest orange-reds and the subtlest variations of blue. This is particularly important as the effect of the final ten plates of vol. VI depend so wholly on the precision of the colorist: they depict brilliant white shells against a deep matte black background, which has been carefully made to surround even the fine asterisks denoting the volume number beside the plate number. In addition to the coloration itself is the deployment of metallic hues in the titles as well as on certain plates, and a more widespread use of gum arabic both to emphasize the surface texture as well as the depth of color in some places. A true triumph of the colorist's art. Zissen ZBI, 2235.
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