Author: Deshayes, G. P.
Title: Description des coquilles fossiles des environs de Paris. Tome premier. Conchifères. Tome second. Mollusques.
Description: Paris, l'Auteur [and] Béchet Jeune, Baudouin, Treutel et Wurtz, 1824. Two volumes in five. 4to. (31 x 23 cm). Title pages, 392, 783 (handwritten between pp. 427-450, and after 474; and including the unnumbered index pages; partly in a separate, 5th, bound volume); 28, 50 pp.; 164 (of 172) [62 of 65; 102 of 107 (1-106, 94bis)] lithographed plates; table. Contemporary pebbled half cloth over marbled boards. Atlas volumes with gilt-titled spines and marbled endpapers. = This finely illustrated monograph is one of the earliest, and rarest on the rich, mostly Eocene, fossil assemblages of the Paris Basin. The first livraison (pp. 1-36) was printed on smaller paper (27.5 x 20 cm). The text of the gastropod section is partly in a neat, old hand, as are a few plates. The plate of the famous giant cerith (actually a species of Campanile) is very large, and quadruple-folded. As nearly always with Deshayes' works, the plate numbering is highly peculiar: Roman and Arabic numbers are used randomly; some plates lack a plate number, and a few lack even figure numbers and captions (perhaps these are proof plates). The atlas to the bivalves lacks plates 16, 29 and 30, and that of the gastropods plates 65, 76, 82, 86 and 101. Thus the total number of plates in this copy is 164 of 172. Oddly enough, the work is listed in Baillière catalogue (bound in the rear of the gastropod atlas) as having 166 plates! The last five plates are of Foraminifera. A former owner has added handwritten explanatory leaves to most of the gastropod plates. Old, traced pencil plates replace nearly all of the lacking plates and there is no plate explanation for the plates 99-106. Spine of the gastropod atlas volume broken; scattered spotting, some marginalia adjacent to a few plates, or in light pencil next to the figures, otherwise good. Caprotti, p. 184; Nissen ZBI, 1090.

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