Last week, Christie’s auctioned a particularly attractive copy of the sale catalogue of the library of the Comte de Mirabeau. Despite an estimate of US$2,500 at the upper end, the book eventually sold for an eye-watering US$12,000. Listing nearly 3,000 titles, the beginning of what Mirabeau hoped to be a large and open research library, the catalogue provides evidence that Mirabeau owned a copy of the first French edition of Macintosh’s Travels. Evidence of ownership is not, of course, evidence of reading, especially for a bibliophile like Mirabeau, but it is always a useful spark to further inquiry. Many of the books in Mirabeau’s library came as a job lot from the library of the Comte de Buffon, so the tantalising possibility exists that this particular copy of Macintosh’s Travels may have previously been owned by him.

All told, four editions of the French translation of Travels were published in a seven-year period straddling the Revolution: 1786, 1788, 1792, and 1793 (the first two of which, per standard practice at the time, bore the false imprint “A Londres”, while the third* advertised the translator-cum-editor, Jacques-Pierre Brissot, and the real city of publication, Paris). Each of these editions circulated and was read (or not read) in ways that are difficult to identify and reconstruct over a distance of centuries. Small clues, like the catalogue of Mirabeau’s library, do, however, offer us something to go on. As ever, there is more digging to do. Onwards, onwards!

* Brissot’s name was, by the 1793 edition, again absent, possibly reflecting his changing fortunes in the year of his arrest and execution.