Ledermüller, Martin Frobenius (1719-1769)
Amusement Microscopique tant pour l'Esprit, que pour les Yeux.
Nuremberg: Adam Wolfgang Winterschmidt, 1764, 1766. 1768.
First edition in French, thick quarto, three parts and supplement in one volume; illustrated with hand-colored frontispiece 150 hand-colored plates (a few printed in color), and two hand-colored folding plates; bound in full contemporary German marbled calf, with gilt tooling and lettering to the spine and blind rolled tooling to the boards, decorative paste decoration to page edges, contents very good; 9 1/2 x 7 1/2 in.
Ledermüller's beautifully hand-colored and fascinatingly arranged compositions, engraved after his own drawings, were inspired by the collection of natural history specimens in Bayreuth belonging to the Frederick, Margrave of Brandenburg-Bayreuth. Perusing the book, one recalls the childhood excitement of viewing samples under magnification for the first time. From butterfly wings, crystals, minute seashells, microscopic waterborne life forms, fabric, and botanical samples, to the human fingerprint, fleas, houseflies, and lice, all can be found in this volume, in vivid hand-color. Our guide to this miniature world also provides practical advice for building microscopes, and different ways of viewing slides and projecting images from the microscope for others to view.
Wellcome III 472.
Provenance: from the Stephen White Collection.
