8vo. pp. viii, 348. Modern half calf; original drab wrappers bound in. Illegible word handwritten in ink on half title page. Handwritten annotations in ink. 

Anonymously written book by the gamekeeper turned poacher Charles Nodier (1780-1844; see his 1812 work Questions de littérature légale (Bib# 4173324/Fr# 1639 in this collection), in which Nodier still criticized forgery). The work by the great connoisseur of forgery and plagiarism is a highly influential specimen of conspiratorial history derived from biographical fantasies and imaginary cabals, which proved enduringly popular in France and elsewhere. Barbier attributes it to Nodier, Jacques Rigomer-Bazin, Didier (de Grenoble), Lemare, and Vincent Lombard, de Langres. Cf. A. A. Barbier, Dictionnaire des ouvrages anonymes. Paris, 1873, vol. 2, col. 768. See A. Thierry, Les grandes mystifications littéraires. Paris, 1911, vol. I, pp. 155-165, for a discussion of the book as an influentially deceptive fantasy, more clearly a forgery than Nodier’s collaboration with his fellow forgers Amédée Pichot and Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Lagnon on various spurious Mémoires of celebrities. See also A. Freeman, “Hoax and Forgery, Whimsy and Fraud: Taxonomic Reflections on the Bibliotheca Fictiva,” in W. Stephens & E. Havens (eds.), Literary forgery in early modern Europe, 1450-1800, Baltimore, 2018, p. 22.

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