TRAITÉ DE L'USAGE DU PANTOMÈTRE, instrument geometrique, propre à prendre toutes fortes d’angles, mezurer les distances accessibles & inaccessibles, arpenter & diviser toutes fortes de figures, &c. Nouvellement inventé par le Sr Bullett, architecte & ingenieur du Roi, & de la Ville. A Paris, Chez André Pralard, ruë Saint Jacques, à l’Occasion. [collophon p. 187, De l’Imprimerie de la Veuve d’Antoine Chrestien, et Charles Guillery.]
1675. 12mo in 8s and 4s, pp. [xxii], 26, 187, [5]; with engraved title, engraved coat of arms on verso of title, 25 full-page engraved illustrations printed within the text, and with woodcut device on title and woodcut initials and headpieces; old paper repair at tail of engraved title, with some signs of wear along gutter and seeming repair to fore-edge of eiii, small tear at tail of p. 37 just touching margin of plate but with no loss, some light browning and foxing throughout, but generally clean and bright; in contemporary vellum, though possibly later binding, marbled edges, covers a little soiled and boards slightly sprung, contemporary ownership signature on rear paste-down; a good copy. First and only edition of this finely illustrated description of the ‘pantomètre’ invented by Pierre Bullet (1639?-1716), one of the foremost architect-engineers of his time. A student of François Blondel (1628-1686), ‘he undertook a wide range of civic works in Paris, including rebuilding the Quay le Peletier in 1673. With Blondel, Bullet was asked to draw up a general plan of Paris, for the benefit of the city and the nation. This was carried out with great skill and published in 1676. His ‘pantomètre’ was intended to speed up the surveying process, and was a combination of graduated rules, two pivoted together and a third able to slide along one of the other two’ (Gaskell, 18: 23). Bullet notes on p. 17 that his instrument can be obtained from the maker Lemaire ‘sur le quai des Morfondus au Cercle divisé’.
The 25 attractive illustrations are ‘well executed and are a combination of line-engraving and etching. They show the instrument and its parts, and its use by surveyors in fine landscape backgrounds. There is also an attractive engraved title, and full-page engraved arms of the dedicatee, Claude le Peletier’ (ibid).
‘The most famous of his works is the Porte Saint-Martin which he built in 1674. The church of Saint-Thomas d'Aquin, the sidewalk of the Quai Pelletier supported by a vault cut in its quarter-circle arch, the fountain of the Place Saint-Michel... led to his admission, in 1685, to the Academy of Architecture. He published several important works: Traité de l'usage du pantomètre (1675), Traité du nivellement, l'architecture pratique, etc.’ (translation of Hoefer, Nouvelle Biographie Générale VII, p. 768)
Bibliography: With copies located at the Burndy Library, the Huntington, the Getty, Berkeley, Columbia, Smithsonian, Kansas, Wisconsin, the American Philosophical Society, the Library of Congress, Iowa, Harvard, the Adler Planetarium and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Cambridge and Oxford.