This Sammelband gathers four strands of Bordeaux's own reading culture around 1870 under a single binding: a vineyard owner's practical guide to the region's wines, a dead local poet's collected verse in Gascon dialect, a wine-trade almanac for the coming year, and a satirical civic pamphlet in defense of the city's women. Together they read less as four unrelated pamphlets than as a portrait of what an educated Bordelais of the period might have kept on a single shelf. The compilation spans two years. Paul de Chasteigner's Vins de Bordeaux, in its second and enlarged edition of 1869, opens the volume - its author a vineyard owner at Bourg-en-Gironde, writing for the general reader rather than the trade, and straying along the way into real estate history: the young Chateau Palmer under its earlier name, and Baron James de Rothschild's celebrated 1868 purchase of Chateau Lafite. Antoine Verdie, the Gascon poet known as Meste Verdie, had been dead almost half a century by the time Goudin issued this posthumous collected edition in 1868; Edouard Feret's Almanach du Buveur for 1870 - from the publisher that would make Bordeaux et ses vins a standard reference - closes with a dated account of the vine's newest and gravest disease. Jacques Le Doux's La Bordelaise, illustrated by the caricaturist Paul Hadol and co-published in Bordeaux and Paris the same year, completes the set. A contemporary handwritten note on the front endpaper lists all four in the order bound. A presentation inscription on the half title of the fourth work is hardly decipherable.

First edition of a remarkably concise manifesto for practical wine improvement, joining cellar hygiene and disciplined vinification to the increasingly ampelographic idea that the quality of wine begins with the choice of grape. Writing from Bordeaux in 1875, Eugène Glady attacks growers who remain "slaves to custom and routine," declaring routine "the negation of all progress." Drawing on his experience buying wines in the Agenais and Quercy, he moves from fermentation, racking, topping-up and sulphuring to a geographical survey of superior cépages, linking Pinot to Burgundy, Cabernet Sauvignon to Lafite and Margaux, the principal white varieties to Sauternes and Barsac, and Petite Sirah to Hermitage. Citing the great ampelographer Comte Odart and recording his own experiments with varieties including Saperavi, Glady writes at the moment when empirical improvement and varietal selection were becoming central questions in French viticulture, just as phylloxera was beginning to overturn the vineyards themselves.

Rare first edition of this slim survey, pitched at a general readership rather than the wine trade itself and belonging to the promotional à vol d'oiseau genre common in French regional publishing of the period. The formula had already entered wine literature with Auguste Luchet's La Côte-d'Or à vol d'oiseau (1858), and was brought to Bordeaux by Dr. Aussel's much larger La Gironde à vol d'oiseau. Ses grands vins et ses châteaux in 1865. Vène's vol d'oiseau, appearing only two years later, is a remarkably concise Bordeaux contribution to the same genre. The book's own structure narrows twice over: the city of Bordeaux first, in a single sweep from its medieval walls to its 1867 population of two hundred thousand; then its vineyards, surveyed soil by soil and grape by grape; and finally its wines, ranked from the first growths of the Médoc down to the humblest palus reds, fit, in the author's own estimation, only for cheap taverns. Its Conseils vinicoles chapter turns practical, naming the tricks of merchants who fake a price "sacrifice" and counterfeiters trading under invented sociétés de propriétaires, a period consumer-protection notice tucked into a wine guide. Elsewhere, rather than explain fermentation himself, the author directs his reader to Pasteur's work by way of Saint Paul's question to the Corinthians. Absent from Simon, Vicaire, Labadie, and Oberlé.

Published anonymously by a provincial Bordeaux press in 1867, under nothing more than the author's initials, this slender 31-page first edition is the seed of a text that would grow fourfold in six years. By its fourth edition of 1873 it had reached Paris under Chasteigner's full name, with a preface by Charles Monselet, the leading gastronomic writer of Second Empire Paris, a frontispiece by Ch. Donzel, and a dedicatory sonnet to the now very public author. Chasteigner was no professional man of letters but a vineyard owner at Bourg-en-Gironde, writing from direct experience of the world he describes: how to buy without being cheated, taste without prejudice, serve a proper Bordeaux dinner, and even warm a bottle correctly on a winter evening. He closes his case with two thousand years of borrowed authority (Pliny, Cicero, Virgil, the Bordeaux-born Ausonius, and a chorus of Church Fathers, with Solomon himself) marshalled in defense of moderate drinking. This copy carries two small, telling traces of its own working life: an ink addition to the wrapper naming the author's district, as though an early owner already knew which Chasteigner stood behind the initials, and a single pencilled word beside the discussion of the nose, evidence of a reader actually using the little guide at the table it describes. This first edition is unrecorded by both Vicaire and Simon.

First edition of Jean Barennes's study of medieval viticulture and winemaking in the Bordelais as newly attached archiviste-paléographe to the Gironde's own departmental archives. For the occasion, he gathered the result from a seven-part serialization in the Revue historique de Bordeaux et du département de la Gironde into this standalone edition, crowned by the Société d'Agriculture de la Gironde and prefaced by long-serving Gironde archivist J.-A. Brutails. This copy is signed as one of only fifteen printed on papier à bras from an edition of 315, numbered 5 and signed by the publisher, Marcel Mounastre-Picamilh, on the limitation leaf. It carries a second relevant mark beyond the publisher's own: on a separate leaf, Barennes has added his own autograph presentation inscription, dated 7 November 1912. That date falls in the same year Barennes married into the family of Édouard Bardinet and left the Gironde archives for good, taking up the administration of the family's Bordeaux rum and spirits house, a post he held until his death in 1934.