176 photographic plates outside the text with tissue guards, and numerous captioned vignette drawings in the text.
The set is complete with the eleventh volume, entitled La Vie de J.-H. Fabre naturaliste, followed by the Répertoire général analytique des Souvenirs entomologiques, by Dr G.-V. Legros, with a preface by Fabre. It is illustrated with 175 photographic plates outside the text, each with a tissue guard, to which is added, in the final volume, the frontispiece portrait of Jean-Henri Fabre.
Souvenirs entomologiques is Jean-Henri Fabre’s major work. The ten volumes appeared between 1879 and 1907; the Delagrave edition, begun at the end of his life and completed after his death, gave it its monumental and, as it were, definitive form. In it, Fabre gathered more than half a century of observations of living insects, pursued with an experimental patience that led Darwin to famously call him “that inimitable observer.” The work is above all carried by a free, vivid and intensely personal style that continually exceeds the bounds of a simple treatise on natural history.
The Académie française awarded Fabre the Prix Alfred Née in 1910, crowning a work composed over nearly forty years that had already achieved an exceptional readership. It remains the most complete work ever written on the instincts, reproduction and survival strategies of insects.
A very attractive copy of the deluxe issue: it bears the number 1 and was, no doubt for a discerning collector, very finely bound at the time.