Enquête sur l’édition originale de Sertorius de Corneille (1662) : « D’où me vient ce désordre…? »
Type de matériel :
70
In his Bibliographie cornélienne (1876) Émile Picot describes two original editions of Sertorius, a tragedy by Pierre Corneille: number 80 and number 81, which are distinguished not only by the number of pages (95 pages for number 80 and 82 pages for number 81) but also by minor variations in the booksellers’ address on the title page, and additional or missing words in the colophon. Since Émile Picot does not point out those variations, in 1888 the bibliographer Jules Le Petit, who had not seen number 80, would describe and illustrate the two editions as if they had the same title page. In 1928, Avenir Tchermezine, who had not found number 80 either nor paid attention to the variations noted by Picot, would merely reproduce the photograph of number 81’s title page in presenting the two editions, installing thus the long-standing confusion between numbers 80 and 81. The recent discovery of two copies of number 80, one in the Casanatense Library in Rome, the other in the Bibliothèque Romain-Gary in Nice, proves not only that the two editions are different, but that number 80 is a Grenoble counterfeit from the shop of Philippe Charvys. Only number 81 corresponds to the original edition of Sertorius, printed in Rouen by Laurent Maurry in 1662.
Réseaux sociaux