Physiologie du Gout

Brillat-Savarin, Jean-Anthelme. Physiologie du Gout. Librairie des Bibliophiles: Paris, 1879. 8vo (180x110mm) 2 vols half red morocco, marbled bds & eps, [4],xvi,296,[4]pp+[8],320,[4]pp. (preface by Ch Monselet; bound by Blanchetiere-Bretault) In French

BRILLAT-SAVARIN, Jean-Anthelme (1755 -1826)

Physiologie du Gout: avec un preface par Ch. Monselet. Eaux-fortes par Ad. Lalauze.

Paris: Librairie des Bibliophiles, 1879.  Limited Edition. Printed by Imprimerie Jouaust, Rue Saint-Honoré, Paris.  Bound by Blanchetiere-Bretault.

In two volumes.  Octavo (180x110mm half bound red morocco, marbled paper boards and end-papers, spine decorated and lettered in gilt, inlaid dark green morocco, top-edges gilt, else untrimmed,  ribbon marker, frontispiece, [4],xvi,296,[4]pp+[8],320,[4]pp. One of 170 copies on Holland Paper (Van Gelder watermark); total edition 260 copies; this copy unnumbered. In French.

Preface by Charles Monselet.  Illustrated with 63 pictorial engravings by Adolphe Lalauze including the frontispiece portrait as well as numerous sculptured head and tailpieces.

Brillat-Savarin was a French lawyer and politician during and after the French revolution.  Renowned as an epicure and gastronome, he worked on his Physiologie du Gout, all his life, assembling it just before he died; it was privately published at his expense just two months before his death.  Neither a cookery book nor a memoir, it is rather a discussion of the nature of eating in its widest sense.  It starts with twenty gastronomical "aphorismes", perhaps the best known being  "IV tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are"; then thirty "méditations" and finishes with twenty-seven 'variétés' in the form of anecdotes, adventures, recipes and inventions.

"For the French and outsides alike, this work early attained the status of an exemplary culinary text, perhaps the exemplary text.... the Physiology of Taste civilizes eating.  Moreover, it socializes food, and it does so by recounting in story after story our social relations with food.... [it] appears to us today as something of a sociology of taste ahead of its time" (Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, p. 31).


An instant success, Physiologie du Gout has never been out of print since.


The Librairie des Bibliophiles was established in 1869 by Damase Jouast (1834-1893) publishing French classics in small, limited, fine print editions.  Monselet (1825-1888) was a French journalist, novelist, poet and playwright, nicknamed "the king of the gastronomes" by his contemporaries and a close friend of Baron Léon Brisse .  Lalauze (1838-1906) was a French engraver, illustrator and painter, known for his fine steel engraving technique.  Lalauze illustrated many of Jouast's publications.

A fine illustrated copy of the most renowned book on gastronomy in an elegant binding.