A remarkable album on mainly French, but also Swiss and Belgian mushrooms, with beautiful watercolour paintings. They are still as vividly coloured as when they were first made, and depict different mushroom species from different angles. The added publications contain scientific information about mushrooms, accompanied by several colour-printed plates in the different works. They explain their taxonomy, medicinal use, how to grow them, and how to treat mushroom poisoning.
The first work in the collection is a prospectus for Léon Rollands richly illustrated Atlas des champignons de France, Suisse et Belgique and includes 4 colour-printed plates. Ad 2 is a collection of 5 issues of the first year of a French natural history periodical "Lami du médecin" published in monthly instalments from 1909 until at least 1939 (but was likely not continued during or after the Second World War). The short articles about classifying mushrooms and describing different mushroom species are accompanied by vibrantly colour-printed plates depicting the mushrooms on the forest floor, intended to show the reader which mushrooms are edible and which are not. Ad 3 comprises of 7 extracts (Fascicules XIII, V, VI, and IX-XII) from Charles Benardins Soixante champignons comestibles (published in the first half of the 20th century). Benardin (1860-1939) was a French magistrate and political activist from the Vosges region in the Northeast of France. While he had nothing to do with mushrooms or natural history in his professional (political) career, he hailed from the Vosges department where studying, foresting for, and cooking with mushrooms is considered a time-honoured tradition and pastime. Thus, Benardin writing and publishing a work about sixty edible mushrooms is not as surprising as first thought. This is followed by the set of 8 leaves (interleaved with translucent, coated protective paper) showing numerous detailed watercolour drawings of mushrooms. Ad 5 is a manuscript extract based on volume 15 (concerning mushrooms) of the Bibliothèque scientifique internationale (1873-1919), a popular science collection of 123 volumes published under direction of Émile Alglave (1842-1928). The original 15th volume was published in 1875, while the present manuscript is itself dated or refers to a possible later edition - dated 1882.
With an oval purple stamp of "Libraire Poulain-Rocher" (in Sens, France) on the verso of plate 49 in ad 1. The contents of ad 1 are split between the first (title-) page at the start of the work and the plates bound in after ad 3. The marbled paper on the boards has been rubbed along the foot edge. The title-page of ad 1 shows some minor staining, the leaves of ad 3 are somewhat browned. Otherwise in very good condition. Ad 3: cf. WorldCat 458484525 (1 copy).