Champlain | Les voyages de la Novvelle France occidentale, dite Canada, 1640

BOOKS FROM THE LIBRARY OF THE EARLS OF HADDINGTON, LOTS 54-108

CHAMPLAIN, SAMUEL DE

Les voyages de la Novvelle France occidentale, dite Canada. Paris: Claude Collet, 1640

FIRST COLLECTED EDITION, third issue, 4 parts in one volume, 4to (221 x 164mm.), LARGE FOLDING ENGRAVED MAP on two sheets, 550 x 853 (Burden 237, first state, cut close left and right and with small rust-hole), engraved illustrations on HH3, KK2, LL1, PP2, PP4, 2 woodcut charts and a table in the text of the “Traité de la navigation”, early nineteenth-century half calf, occasional scattered light foxing, light marginal dampstaining towards end, joints cracking

THE SCARCE 1640 ISSUE OF THIS CLASSIC WORK OF CANADIAN EXPLORATION. ABPC and Rare Book Hub record only one other copy at auction. The first collected edition of the work appeared in 1632; this third issue is made up from the same sheets the first issue except for a cancel title and leaves D2–3, reprinted in the second issue (also 1632), to remove a passage thought to be objectionable to Richelieu, the dedicatee.

The fine map is “the first to depict the existence of the entire Great Lakes network” (Burden) and is in far greater detail than the author’s previous effort, made around 1616, which shows a confusing and incomplete network of lakes, and is extant in only one copy (Burden 188).

LITERATURE:

Alden/Landis 640/62; Church 446; Burden, The Mapping of North America 237; JCB 2:281; Sabin 11840

PROVENANCE:

Thomas Hamilton (1721-1794), 7th Earl of Haddington, engraved armorial bookplate