SCHMIED (François-Louis). - MARDRUS (Joseph-Charles). Charmi - Lot 103

SCHMIED (François-Louis). - MARDRUS (Joseph-Charles). Charming story of the adolescent Sucre d'amour. Paris, F.-L. Schmied, 1927. In-folio, (12 of which the first 4 are blank)-145-(11 of which the first and last are blank) pp. red-orange morocco, smooth spine, important polychrome geometric decoration mosaicked and filleted on the boards and continuing on the spine, gilt edges, covers and spine preserved, red-orange morocco spine and covers folder, lined case; spine of folder a little faded (Alix). ORIGINAL EDITION of 170 copies on Arches paper, justified and signed by the artist, with a signature at the bottom of the frontispiece. THIS IS ONE OF 12 HEAD COPS, THE ONLY ONE WITH DUPLICATES, each with printed title justified and signed by François-Louis Schmied, one in color (including all 14 full-page compositions and the medium-sized vignettes), the other in black (including 3 of the full-page compositions and the medium-sized vignettes). LUXURIOUS AND CHARMING WOOD ENGRAVED ILLUSTRATION BY FRANÇOIS-LOUIS SCHMIED: more than 640 typographical compositions and ornaments - including 14 full-page color compositions included in the pagination, and more than 130 medium-sized sepia vignettes (including one with the title repeated inverted on the cover). ORIENTALIST DOCTOR, TRAVELLER AND WRITER JOSEPH-CHARLES MARDRUS (1868-1949) was born in Cairo to a Catholic family originally from Georgia. After studying in Beirut and Paris, he became a doctor, working for Messageries maritimes from 1895 to 1899, which gave him the opportunity to revisit the Middle East and discover Southeast Asia. In France, he frequented literary circles, notably Mallarmé's salon, met Robert de Montesquiou and José-Maria Heredia, and scored a major publishing success with his free translation of The Thousand and One Nights (1898-1904), a work whose publication launched a fashion that inspired Ravel and Diaghilev. From 1904 to 1911, he and his wife, the poet Lucie Delarue (they separated in 1915), traveled the Maghreb, Egypt and Turkey. He published several other literary interpretations of oriental tales: biblical or Koranic episodes, ancient Egyptian funerary texts...