Why it matters

An entire 18th-century treatise on chimneys and smoke control, published at Dijon by F. Desventes in 1756 and attributed in library catalogues to Pierre Hébrard — a genuinely odd corner of the technical literature that sits at the junction of architecture, domestic comfort, and early applied physics of draught and combustion. Institutional interest is real rather than notional: the Metropolitan Museum holds a copy in its Drawings and Prints department (Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1937), and the ETH-Bibliothek copy has been digitised in e-rara.

Why we're looking

At $324 it is an inexpensive entry point to a plate-illustrated 18th-century French technical monograph on a subject almost nobody wrote books about, from an established French bookshop trading since the 1990s. No directly comparable copy with a visible price turned up in search, so relative value here is unconfirmed — the ask cannot be called a bargain or a stretch on the evidence I have.

Watch out for

The description is thin — "good condition" only, with no binding description, no collation, and crucially no plate count, so ask the seller directly whether the engraved frontispiece and the full set of folding plates are present and uncut at the folds; catalogued copies vary in how they are described (the e-rara/ETH record notes a frontispiece plus 20 copper plates, while a dealer description of a first edition cites 22 engraved plates, 21 of them folding), and at least one copy on the market is openly described as missing the frontispiece and three figures. Facsimile reprints of this text exist, including a 20th-century in-12 cloth reprint issued under ISBN 9782852040397, so confirm from the title page that this is the 1756 Dijon, Desventes printing rather than a reproduction. The listing itself flags that the seller may not ship to the United States — settle that before bidding or buying.