Paris, Encyclopédie Roret, 1914-1937. Five parts in five. 8vo (21.5 x 13.6 cm). Five half titles and title pages, 1304 pp. (I [1914] vi, 308; II [1926] 309-532; III [1929] 533-772; IV [1932] 773-978; V [1937] 979-1298); 2,028 text illustrations (1-537; 538-812; 813-1112; 1113-1501; 1502-2028). Uniform marbled half calf over marbled boards. Spines with four raised, gilt-bordered bands and gilt title. Marbled endpapers. Speckled edges.

A very rare publication, especially when complete and well-bound, such as this set. Published over a very long time. Volume 6 was not published until after Volume 7, which dealt with minor arthropod groups. Volume 6 was to be devoted to families that had not yet been treated in Volumes 1 - 5, and to a general supplement. The author, the French arachnologist Eugène Louis Simon (1848-1924), had near completed a huge manuscript including all groups not covered, as well as many updates on those published earlier. As pointed out by the editors in their postscript, due to the delay in publication, "Simon, constantly improving his work, realized the need to rework it all, [re-] classified according to the main lines that he had established in the meantime. And it was then that, anxious not to leave a gap in his first work, he conceived the idea of ​​devoting Volume VI, not yet published, to the publication of this manuscript. This conception is in some respects regrettable, because it leads to confusion: this is why we wish to specify that Volume VI constitutes, in reality, a separate work, which is in itself a complete study of the spiders of the French fauna", whereas, initially, Simon merely envisioned a descriptive part of a few families not yet covered, and an index. Simon managed to publish the first part (ten years before his death). With the second part, published 12 years later, the French entomologists and arachnologists Lucien Berland (1888-1962) and Jean Baptiste Louis Fage (1883-1964) took over, editing and publishing the other four volumes. We found no auction records of complete copies, nor are there any on the internet. Stamp in the top margin of the half-titles, otherwise clean, unmarked, as new. Bonnet, pp. 584-585. Not in Nissen ZBI.