Why it matters

Clamorgan's wolf-hunting treatise is the standard early-modern French text on the subject, mixing natural history of the wolf with practical instruction on dogs, nets and traps, and it was printed from 1566 onward as a separately-titled appendix to Estienne and Liébault's L'Agriculture et maison rustique rather than as a freestanding book. Its reputation rests substantially on the in-text woodcuts of traps, snares and hunting scenes, which dealer descriptions of the 1583, 1597 and 1602 printings record as fourteen large blocks.

Why we're looking

A Rouen/Geuffroy issue of the tract surfacing on its own, in a dominoté-paper wrapper and purpose-made box, is an attractive small object and the kind of provincial printing that rarely appears separately. On value, though, the comparison runs the wrong way: the 1583 Du Puys copy with fourteen woodcuts — albeit fair condition and lacking one leaf — is listed at US$344.71 on AbeBooks, below this US$478 ask for a 14-page piece with five woodcuts, so this does not read as underpriced on the comps we found.

Watch out for

The seller's own text is self-contradictory and that is the headline problem: it calls the volume one "avec des reproductions modernes des gravures qu'il contient" while in the same parenthesis describing "5 belles gravures sur bois anciennes," then closes by calling it a "rare et précieuse édition complète de 5 gravures sur bois" — so whether the woodcuts in hand are original impressions or modern facsimiles is genuinely unresolved and must be settled before featuring. The stated 14 pp. with five woodcuts also sits well short of what dealers record for other early printings of the tract — 19 leaves with 14 woodcuts for the 1583 Du Puys, 43 pp. with 14 woodcuts for the 1597 (cited to Schwerdt I, 113) — so "complete" here needs challenging, with a leaf-by-leaf collation and signature statement requested. The stitched block in 19th-century marbled paper and 20th-century wrapper means the original structure is gone, which further limits what can be judged from photographs.