2 volumes in one, 12mo (152 x 92 mm). Titles printed in red and black, etched double-page frontispieces in each volume, 22 plates (21 folding), including 3 maps (2 folding). (Light toning or offsetting to folding maps.) Contemporary speckled calf, spine in 5 compartments with 4 raised bands, gilt-lettering in one, others gilt, red speckled edges (joints a bit worn, discoloration near foot, some surface wear or worming to covers). Provenance: Heinrich Reichsfreiherr Grote zu Schauen (1675-1753), German nobleman and state official (armorial bookplate).

FIRST EDITION, FIRST ("ANGEL") ISSUE OF THE FIRST TWO PARTS OF LAHONTAN’S CELEBRATED ACCOUNT OF NEW FRANCE, WITH HIS FAMOUS AND ENIGMATIC MAP OF THE “LONGUE RIVIÈRE,” ONE OF THE GREAT CARTOGRAPHIC FICTIONS OF EARLY NORTH AMERICAN EXPLORATION.

Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, baron de Lahontan, arrived in New France in 1683 as a young officer in the French colonial forces and spent much of the following decade traveling through the interior of North America. In 1687, he entered the Michigan country and spent the winter of 1687-88 as commander of Fort St. Joseph. Drawing upon his military service, journeys through the Great Lakes country, and encounters with Indigenous peoples, his Nouveaux Voyages offered European readers one of the most vivid and influential descriptions of French North America to appear at the close of the seventeenth century.

Most celebrated is Lahontan’s account of his purported 1688-89 journey west of the Mississippi along the “Longue Rivière,” illustrated by his famous map of this imaginary waterway. Probably based in part on Indigenous geographical information, Lahontan’s fictitious river proved remarkably persistent, entering European cartography and appearing on maps well into the eighteenth century.

Despite its “over-imaginative” elements, Lahontan’s account proved highly influential, contributing to “the subsequent growth of primitivism in France and England,” as reflected in Montesquieu, Voltaire, Swift, and others. His imagined western interior was populated by the Essanapes, who “worshiped the sun, the moon, and the stars,” and the Gnascitares, a supposedly advanced people inhabiting the shores of a great lake, with three-story buildings, enormous canoes, and a royal court attended by hundreds of servants (Howgego). Howes L-25; Lande 497; Michigan Rarities 6; Pilling, p.288; Sabin 38635, 38636; Wheat, Transmississippi 86.