In Folio: Rare Volumes in the Stanford University Libraries

DENIS DIDEROT, 1713-1784, EDITOR.
Recueil de planches, sur les sciences, les arts libéraux, et les arts méchaniques avec leur explication ....
A Paris: Briasson [et] Le Breton, 1762-72.

These plates illustrating printing are from the eleven volumes of plates supplementing the famous Diderot Encyclopédie, the most famous of all eighteenth-century encyclopedias. Diderot as editor benefited from having many outstanding contributors to this work, including Voltaire (1694-1778), Montesquieu (1689-1755), and Rousseau (1712-1778). Begun as a project to translate into French Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopeadia, which had first appeared in 1728, the Encyclopédie quickly developed a different nature. Its underlying rationalism, its attacks on what it called superstition, and its skeptical tendencies render it a model of eighteenth-century thought, and as such it earned the enmity of many of the clergy and official classes. In 1759, the seven volumes published to date were banned by the French Attorney-General and condemned by the Pope; by 1780 seven pirated editions of the Encyclopédie had been printed in various cities in Europe.

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