19th Century Books

19thCenturyBooks_WIP-3.jpg

Hello everyone!

In between projects, I am working on these 19th century old books that I received from a very dear friend of mine.
Her mother recently passed away and when sorting through her belongings, she thought of keeping these for me.
My friend is 70 and her mother was, I believe, 96. She had a collection of very old books, some dating back to the 18th century, which I will be keeping.
I will be keeping three books that were published in 1780, when France was still a monarchy, they have witnessed the world change completely.
Uranus wasn't discovered yet, it had to wait another year for William Herschel.
The US were in the midst of their revolutionary war to gain independence from Britain, which happened 3 years later.

The three books of 1780 are from l'Abbé de Grécourt, it's actually four tomes, but I only have an incomplete four of them, the tome 1, 2 and 4. You can easily find the e-books for free on google play if you're curious.

The fourth book I'd like to retain is a course of natural history dating from 1840, destined for school children.
A subject I am interested in and I like the idea of leafing through a book that is 181 years old. It’s in really good condition too.
All the other books are also from the 19th century, which is still very impressive in terms of age. But a little less and I will be using them for my sculptural work.

Let me know if you want a dedicated video of me simply flipping through these books and going even more nerdy on history and facts, before I give them another life. They do have a certain amount of beautiful etchings as well.
I don't know how interesting this will be to you, but I thought I'd ask.

I only worked on one so far, which was about accounting. Full of numbers. Most of the others have etchings, and I would like to do something about those as they are tiny little treasures.
These books will be part of my solo show next year with Beinart Gallery which will be all about sculptures on books.

You can see me work on this one on my YouTube channel as well:

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