Estimate: $1,500 - $2,500
The Collection of Victor Niederhoffer part II
Auction: September 19, 2019 11:00:00 AM EDT
[Amsterdam?], 1720. Folio. Title page (382 x 249mm.) in red & black. [2], 1-25[1], 1-52, (1)-31, i.e.29, [1], 1-8, 1-10pp. + additional related folding folio letterpress sheet with engraved vignette at front. Illustrated with 75 engraved or etched plates, including portrait of John Law, “frontispiece”, folding & double-page plates, maps, letterpress sheets with engraved vignettes. Contemporary mottled brown calf, stamped with gilt and blind panels and devices, richly gilt spine compartments, morocco spine label; lightly rubbed with joints cracked but holding; some soiling to title page and edges at front and back, else generally clean with a few scattered paper faults to text and plates. In undisturbed 18th century binding retaining its original end papers and front and back blanks. Sabin 28932.
First edition of The Great Mirror of Folly showing the Rise, Progress, and Downfall of the Bubble In stocks in 1720, occasioned by the collapse of the Mississippi Company founded by the banker John Law, Controller General of Finances of France. This volume is a collection of letterpress & graphic satires relating to that collapse. The number of plates in copies varies.
A.H. Cole in The Great Mirror of Folly, Boston , 1949 states, “ ...so strange was the mode of issuance [ of this work] that no two specimens..are exactly the same. Neither the textual material nor the engraved prints are always the same...”