First edition in French of Playfair's Statistical Breviary, "his most theoretical book about graphics", in which he "broke free of analogies to the physical world and drew graphics as designs-in-themselves" (Tufte, p. 44); first published in English in 1801. It contains what is generally credited as the first pie chart. The inventor of statistical graphs, William Playfair (1759-1823) invented the series line graph, the bar chart, and the pie chart "without significant precursors" (ODNB). One of the scarcest and most important of Playfair's works, "the Breviary arose out of a friend's project to gather together and publish descriptive, cartographic and statistical material about a number of European countries. The author [of the aforementioned project, the Gazetteer], John Stockdale, also printed and sold books, and he invited Playfair to update a wealth of statistical information compiled by Jakob Boetticher (1754-1792) in Königsberg. The outcome was a series of tables, inauspiciously arrayed. The book consisted of 64 pages, most of them displaying tables of data, country by country, but with four plates, of which the most famous is that showing the first pie chart, 'Statistical chart showing the extent, the population and revenues of the principal nations of Europe in the order of their magnitude'" (Pritchard, unpaginated). Playfair reasoned that "as much information might be obtained in five minutes as would require whole days to imprint on the memory. by a table of figures" (English edition, p. xii). Playfair's charts were met with resistance in Britain, with many doubting their accuracy, but were more readily accepted in Germany and France. The French translation was prepared by Denis-François Donnant (b. 1769), a French statistician, historian, and interpreter who emigrated at the beginning of the French Revolution to England and then to America. He returned to France in 1798, where he translated a number of statistical works. In 1805 he published Théorie élémentaire de la statistique, one of the first books on this subject to be written in France. He was a member of the Statistical Society and the Athénée des arts. Donnant did not merely produce a translation of Playfair's work, but also added several original contributions, expanding it to almost twice its original length with the inclusion of a comparative table of the size and population of the départements of France and a statistical summary of America. Playfair translated the latter portion into English as the Statistical Account of the United States of America (1805). Kress B.4583; not in Einaudi, Goldsmiths', Mattioli, or Sraffa. Chris Pritchard, "Life of Pie: William Playfair and the Impact of the Visual", July 2021, available online; Edward R. Tufte, Visual Display of Quantitative Information, second edition, 2007. Octavo (192 x 122 mm). Contemporary tree sheep, smooth spine with red label and elaborate gilt tooling incorporating wheat sheaf motifs to compartments, edges red, blue silk bookmarker. 2 large folding letterpress tables and 5 hand-coloured folding engraved charts. Binding presenting handsomely, endpapers browned from turn-ins, a few pencilled annotations to front matter, some creases to first few pages of text, gathering I evenly browned, fold of plate facing p. 7 expertly strengthened along fold verso. A very good copy, internally crisp and clean.
