[ARNAULD DANDILLY, Robert] La Maniere de cultiver les Arbres Fruitiers. Par le Sieur Le Gendre, Cur dHenonville. O il est traitt des Pepinieres. Des Espalliers. Des Contrespalliers. Des Arbres en buisson, & haute tige... Paris, Antoine Vitr, 1653
12mo (141 x 80 mm), pp [lii] 239 [recte 235] [1]; title slightly dust-soiled, a few gatherings a bit loose, but a very nice copy in contemporary vellum. 1450 Second edition (first 1652, very rare) of this important early work on the cultivation of fruit-trees, written by Arnauld dAndilly under the pseudonym Antoine Le Gendre. Le Gendre was inspecteur des jardins to Louis XIII before becoming a country priest near Rouen, where he was visited by Pierre Corneille, the playwright, who enjoyed the fruit from his garden. La Quintinie gives him credit for being the first to suggest training fruit trees as espaliers and grafting pears on quince stocks (Sandra Raphael, An Oak Spring Pomona). This work went through numerous editions well into the eighteenth century, and a facsimile edition was published in Rouen in 1879. An English translation was published in 1660 as The manner of ordering fruit-trees, commonly assumed to have been translated by John Evelyn from the second edition as above, a copy of which, now in the British Library, he possessed. Goldsmith L733; NUC records only one location for the 1652 edition (MH-A), and two for the second: CU MBHo; no further locations in OCLC
1450
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