Diderot / D'Alembert - Encyclopedie. Franco Maria Ricci. 18 volumi - 1970-1980

Diderot / D'Alembert, Encyclopédie. Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers. Parma, Franco Maria Ricci, 1970-1980. 18 volumes of about 500 pages (complete work), bound in silk with gilded titling. The first 12 volumes are plates, the remaining are text. Edition of 3000 copies (our no. 1300 ad personam). A promotional presentation of the work, certificates, and a pre-printed letter with Franco Maria Ricci’s autograph are enclosed. Volumes in excellent condition, still inside the protective transparent acetate – slight yellowing of the silk at the margins.

The monumental reissue of the Encyclopédie by Diderot and d’Alembert, curated by Franco Maria Ricci between 1970 and 1980, represents one of the publisher’s most lavish and ambitious undertakings. Conceived not only as a rigorous historical restoration but as a true bibliographic work of art for collectors, this colossal project unfolds in a total of eighteen folio-sized volumes, measuring approximately forty by twenty-six centimeters, characterized by the unmistakable and elegant graphic presentation that made the publisher FMR famous worldwide. Each volume features a rigid binding fully clad in precious dark brown oriental silk, on which titles, numbers, and refined geometric engravings are impressed in gold both on the spine and on the covers. To ensure a tactile and visual experience that recalled the porosity and prestige of seventeenth-century volumes, the pages were printed on a special high‑weight paper with deckle edges, specially produced by the historic Miliani mills of Fabriano. Structurally, the work performs an extraordinary act of critical selection, concentrating on the visual and philosophical core of the original Paris edition published between 1751 and 1772. The main part of the work comprises twelve volumes entirely devoted to illustrated plates, faithfully reproduced in facsimile and in their original scale, featuring thousands of splendid copper engravings of the period, spanning from the famous anatomical sections to detailed cutaways of industrial machines, artisan workshops, architecture, seamanship, and science, each accompanied by the corresponding textual explanations. Complementing this visual nucleus are five volumes of text that collect in the original French a reasoned anthology of the most revolutionary and historically significant articles written by the Fathers of the Enlightenment, such as Voltaire, Rousseau, d’Holbach, and the very Diderot and d’Alembert themselves. The entire work is sealed by an eighteenth concluding volume printed in 1980, which serves as a guide to consultation and as a critical apparatus in Italian, enriched by historical essays and by a renowned introductory prologue commissioned especially from the great writer Jorge Luis Borges, focusing on the universal charm of the encyclopedic dream and human knowledge.