Why it matters

The Nouveaux Mélanges are the vehicle Gabriel Cramer built in Geneva from 1765 onward to carry Voltaire's short pieces on religion, politics, history and literature, and several of those texts appear here in their first printing. The series grew well past its originally planned three volumes into a long collection that Bengesco treats as running to nineteen volumes — making a complete run a substantial slice of late-Voltaire publishing in one place.

Why we're looking

A set described as complete in 19 volumes in uniform period marbled calf, with a named aristocratic bookplate in every volume, is the hard configuration to assemble — the visible market runs to three-, five- and seven-volume fragments. No directly comparable complete set with a price turned up in search, so relative value at $1,361 is unconfirmed; the partial sets we found (Van Zaelen on AbeBooks, Biblion Antiquariat on ZVAB) showed no usable prices and aren't comparable in extent.

Watch out for

The seller flags the issues itself — light foxing throughout, a few worn spine caps, light water-staining, marginal worming in volume 13, one missing spine label — and also notes that its part 11 is dated 1774 and part 12 dated 1773, i.e. out of sequence against the Bibliothèque Nationale entries it otherwise matches. That kind of date irregularity is worth pressing on, because another dealer describing this collection notes that most surviving sets are mixed, combining different printings by different publishers. Ask whether all 19 volumes are Cramer-printed or whether some parts are later or pirated reprints, and whether the binding is genuinely uniform across the run.