Cycling/ Lesclide/ Regamey/ Adventure/ Prehistory/ Russia - Lot 45

Cycling/ Lesclide/ Regamey/ Adventure/ Prehistory/ Russia This magnificent 1870 volume is the cornerstone of the nascent velocipede movement: "Le Tour du monde en vélocipède" by Le Grand Jacques, illustrations by Felix Regamey (1844-1902). Bound in full gray cloth, covers preserved, slightly trimmed, red title page, 1870, 22 x 13.5 cm. It's with this magical book from 19 rue des Martyrs (just around the corner from here, and from the "Petit Journal" on rue La Fayette, of which the great Jacques, alias Richard Lesclide, was a contributor), that we discover a new freedom, and wide-open spaces, as we travel from Paris to Nijnie-Novgorod on a velocipede (via St Quentin, Erquelines, Liège, Hanover, Potsdam, Berlin, Kowno, Louga, Kazan, Perm, Yaloutorowsk) in the wheel of a giant cyclist named Victorine. Richard Lesclide (1825-1892), who signs here under the pseudonym Le Grand Jacques, is the providential man who carved out the road for "this intelligent iron horse". Inventing the cycling press, creating races, romanticizing this new world to make it plausible and edible, the man who had a thousand lives, including one close to Victor Hugo, is one of those phenomena who, like Eugène Chapus, Pierre Giffard, Eugène Desbonnet, Georges de St Clair and Baron de Coubertin, invented a new world, that of sport. Sadly, it has gone astray, but here, what beauty and candor in these 268 pages, which are also a pedal-powered version of Blaise Cendrars' "La prose du Transibérien" (1913). Slight traces of damp, otherwise a fine copy. The off-book advertising page for "Le Vélocipède illustré" has a tear. Traces of moisture on spine.