BRIGANDS, THE WANDERING JEW, AND AN ELEPHANT: THE ADVENTURES OF ‘PRETTY’. Small 4to. (4), 124 pp, plus engr. title-page and 17 further plates. Bound in contemporary quarter calf over floral-embossed white boards, with gilt title on spine. A charming, fresh and perfectly unsophisticated copy; with engr. title-page and all plates finished in meticulous contemporary hand-coloring. Magnificently-preserved copy of this rare, well-illustrated tale of an intrepid young orphan who goes out into the world in search of a miraculous plant capable of curing his grandmother’s blindness. Named only as ‘Pretty’, the young boy’s adventures begin in a fairly pedestrian way, encountering a villager, donkey, a bridge, etc. In Chapter VII Pretty takes a meal with a religious hermit; in Chaper X he escapes on horseback from a gang of ‘brigands’; in Chapter XI he encounters the Wandering Jew, who obliges him by carrying him in a basket on his back; and in Chapter 13 he is suddenly astride an elephant, led by a ‘black man in a foreign costume’ who gives our now-starving protagonist bread and water. After further escaping from a giant and a snake, the “petit voyageur” returns home with his prize to his distraught grandmother. After working as a tutor, Jean-Pierre Brès (1782-1832) lectured at several Parisian institutions including the Athénée des Arts and the Cercle des Arts. From 1823 he also served as editor of the Revue encyclopédique; and just before his death he published a handful of artistically-inclined titles mainly aimed at a juvenile audience. The present edition was printed by G. Doyen for Louis Janet and is dated by Gumuchian to 1836. As far as we can tell, the only other surviving copy as such is in the Osborne Collection at the Toronto Public Library. Uncolored copies are held at UC Irvine, Indiana, and the BnF only. * Gumuchian 907