DICTIONNAIRE ARGOT-FRANCAIS & FRANCAIS-ARGOT
Paris, France: Paul Ollendorff, 1896. FIRST EDITION. Leather_bound. Essentially, a Slang-French/French-Slang Dictionary. Preface by Jean Rechepin. Half-bound calf over lovely marbled boards, with non-pareil-style marbling to endpapers. Book measures approximately 9" x 5.75". Rubbing and crazing to leather, particularly to joings and spine with a .25" tear at top of spine, which has five raised bands, and gilt lettering of author, title, and (at bottom), date. Corners rubbed through to board, age tanning to pages, and fore-edge and tail untrimmed. Very solidly bound. Very Good Minus. Item #72399
Braunholtz's Books of Reference for Students and Teachers of French: A Critical Survey (p. 58, MacMillan & Bowes, 1901)) called Delesalle's slang dictionary the best of those available, but even then, not satisfactory. Our guess is just as slang is today, the language of the back alleys of the seldom-safely-sojourned Parisian arrondissement was so dynamic and fluid, by the time someone completed a glossary, many words had already been replaced. Perhaps by definition the only reliable and up-to-date dictionary would be the verbal, culturally-borne variety, not a bound-and-sewn construct of leather, cloth, and ink-upon-paper.
Price: $100.00