2 Jean-Jacques Rousseau first editions are documented on this shelf, from Du contrat social (1762) to Émile, ou De l'éducation (1762) across 2 different publishers. Each linked guide gives the points of issue that separate a true first printing of that Jean-Jacques Rousseau title from later printings and book-club copies — the publisher and year to expect, the number-line or edition-statement conventions, and the tells that show up in online listings.
Identification only, per the house rule: no prices and no appraisals here. Checking a Jean-Jacques Rousseau copy in hand? Type the title into the First-Edition Checker or photograph the copyright page with Snap & Sort.
- Du contrat social — 1762 · Marc-Michel Rey, AmsterdamAmsterdam: Marc-Michel Rey, 1762. The true first is the octavo (in-8, approx. 197 x 126 mm), which Rey completed in March 1762. It carries an engraved copper title vignette of Justice seated, holding a balance in one hand and a cap on the end of a staff in the other, and Rey's own catalogue at the end. The octavo exists in two title-page settings, conventionally lettered A and B after Dufour and Tchemerzine (V,…. No UK/US question — the original language is French and Rey's Amsterdam octavo of 1762 is the true first. The census is right that the octavo has priority but wrong that the two Rey formats were simultaneous: Rey printed and finished the octavo in March 1762 and only then set the cheaper duodecimo, completed some six weeks later (sources place it in April or mid-May). The genuine hazard is piracy, not format.…. No book-club issue exists for a 1762 imprint. The reprint and 'first thus' tells are: the thirteen recorded eighteenth-century piracies bearing Rey's false Amsterdam address (identified by the p. 76 ornament and the p. 1 line-7 break, as above), variously from Lyon, Rouen and probably Paris; Rey's own later duodecimo and subsequent Amsterdam printings; and modern facsimiles and print-on-demand copies, which show….
- Émile, ou De l'éducation — 1762 · Nicolas-Bonaventure Duchesne, Paris — issued under false Néaulme imprintsThe true first is Duchesne's Paris printing of 1762 in four volumes, issued in two formats: a duodecimo carrying the false imprint 'A Amsterdam, Chez Jean Neaulme' (McEachern 1b) and an octavo carrying the false imprint 'A La Haye, Chez Jean Néaulme'. Titles are printed in red and black, with five engravings including frontispieces after Charles Eisen. Half-titles are normally absent from volume I but present in…. A French original-language first; there is no competing true first in another language. The census note requires correction on one point: no 1762 issue carries a Paris imprint. Both collected Duchesne formats bear false Néaulme imprints — Amsterdam on the duodecimo, The Hague on the octavo — and both are collected as the first edition. Separately, under an agreement of November 1761 with Duchesne, Jean Néaulme…. Book-club issues do not exist for an eighteenth-century title. The operative trap is that a 'Jean Néaulme' 1762 imprint by itself establishes nothing, since Néaulme's own genuine parallel Amsterdam edition also exists alongside Duchesne's two false-imprint formats. Collate format (12mo versus 8vo), the five Eisen plates, the red-and-black titles, the half-title pattern across volumes I–IV, and the cancels against….
More Nonfiction & Memoir shelves: Joan Didion, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John L. Stephens, John McPhee, John Milton, John Ruskin.
← All authors · All genres · part of the First-Edition Identification resource.