About this Item
First edition. Uncommon, with no copies seen at auction: WorldCat locates Bibliothèque nationale de France, British Library, Newberry, Wurttembergische Landesbibliothek, Paris Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, and the University of Rostock only. This comprehensive manual includes a glossary of navigational terms, methods of establishing longitude, the lodestone, tables of difference, declination, and ascension, and a course on celestial navigation. Dassié is a somewhat obscure figure. He was apparently born in Normandy, and lived and worked at various times in both le Havre and Rouen. The title pages of his work reveal that he was a "C.R.", or"chanoine régulier" (canon regular) of the Order of Saint-Ruf, an Augustinian order named for the first bishop of Avignon, with various sources describing him as master shipbuilder to the king at Le Havre, and to the coast guard at Toulon. In 1677 he published L'Architecture navale, considered by Polak to be the first such work, and which is often found bound together with Le Routier des Indes Orientales et Occidentales, which offers a compilation of 26 navigations into the East and West Indies. The present work is described in Dassié's entry in the Biographie Universelle as "a testimony to the zeal and knowledge of the author, barely hinting at the advances he made in the nautical art". Crone Library 432 for the 1720 second edition: Polak 2248 Quarto (184 x 145 mm). Decorative initials, tailpieces including one of a ship at sea, numerous diagrams and tables to the text, retains final blank. Contemporary sprinkled calf, red morocco label to the spine, compartments gilt with stylised floral devices, foliate gilt edge-roll, edges sprinkled red and green. Housed in a dark brown quarter morocco solander box by the Chelsea Bindery. A little rubbed and bumped, joints just starting at the head, early ownership inscription to the title page neatly obliterated, light browning and occasional foxing to the text, last few leaves a touch mottled, but overall a very good copy.
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