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Manuel du tourneur, ouvrage dans lequel on enseigne aux amateurs la manière d’exécuter sur le tour à pointes, à lunette, en l’air, excentrique, ovale, à guillocher, quarré, à portraits & autres, tout ce que l’art a produit de plus ingénieux & de plus agréable.

Paris: chez Bergeron (de l’imprimerie de Baudelot et Eberhart), 1792–96.

Collation: 4to:  I: [pi]⁴ A–3H4 [chi]1, 221 leaves, pp. [8] 432 [2] (errata on last leaf, verso blank): II: [pi]² *1 A–3M⁴ 3N² a–d⁴, 253 leaves, pp. [6] 466 [2] xxxii (errata on pp. [2] after the main text; ‘Additions importantes’ make up the final sequence of pagination). Engraved vignettes on titles, woodcut headpieces on I, B2r and Y1v (signed ‘C. L. Pierre sculpsit 1776’), and II, A1r.
Plates: 72 engraved plates: numbered Pl. I–XXX;  I–XLII, signed ‘Dessiné par Goussier Gravé par Moissy [or Sellier, or Coquet sculp]’, all foldouts, the last in each volume larger, 8 plates in vol I. (XXII–XXIX) hand-coloured.
Condition: 253 x 194. Minor foxing and discolouration and a few marginal tears; a fresh clean copy.
Binding: Contemporary mottled calf, gilt spines with red and green labels, marbled endleaves, red edges. A little rubbed.
References: Abell, Bibliography of the art of turning 27; Graesse I, p. 340.
Price: £2,000

First edition. A revised edition was published in 1816.

¶ The most comprehensive work on turning which had appeared up to this time, ‘an encyclopaedic record of the development of the lathe at that time’ (Abell). Salivet was a contributor to the Encyclopédie and author of a Cours d’éducation à l’usage des écoles militaires.

The 72 plates, after drawings by Goussier, illustrate tools, mandrel lathes and other machines as well as examples of finished work, including architectural models. A chapter is devoted to the properties of different woods, which are illustrated in the 72 hand-coloured figures on 8 plates in the first volume.

The first edition is quite rare, OCLC locating copies at Arizona State, Chicago, Illinois and Cornell Universities, New York Public Library and the V&A; RLIN adding Hagley, Getty, Wintherthur and Swarthmore College.

<<The diffusion of scientific method and technology led, as Diderot hoped it would, to alternative ways of thinking. The machine became a dominant cultural metaphor and was seen as a veritable work of art and extension of the individual. Precision machinery and tooling in particular reflected the value and dignity attached to technological innovations. Lathes, which had become very popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, underwent great refinement during the eighteenth century. A contributor to Diderot’s Encyclopédie, Louis Georges Isaac Salivet (1737–1805) summarized these latest advances in his Manuel du tourneur, a comprehensive guide to the art of turning, whose illustrations of machinery suggest the plates to Diderot’s massive compilation. Typical of many eighteenth-century savants, Salivet was a versatile and inquisitive individual. Trained as a lawyer, he also edited classical texts and conducted experiments in physics and mechanics.

>>Robert Rosenthal in The Berlin Collection: being a history and exhibition of the books and manuscripts purchased in Berlin in 1891 for the University of Chicago by William Rainey Harper, (Chicago, 1979; web version at http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/spcl/excat/berlin/).