With original punch cards

[Weaving] - Audibert, P. / Perrin, L. Cours de théorie pour le tissage professé par P. Audibert. Fait par L. Perrin.

€ 7,500.00

Beautifully preserved: an extensive, hand-drawn weaving pattern book compiled in the textile center of Lyon, including five pages of diagrams dedicated solely to punch cards. The work comprises over a hundred hand-painted designs alongside fabric samples illustrating the execution of various patterns.

The new, advanced weaving mills of the 19th century would transfer precisely such designs to punch cards, to be fed into the programmable looms first developed in the early 19th century by the French weaver Joseph Marie Jacquard (a pasted-in albumen photograph of a grid-weaving design of Jacquard's face opens this manuscript). His invention would prove to have paved the way for the computer when the English mathematician Charles Babbage realized that such a programmable machine could be fed punch cards to execute complex calculations rather than weaving patterns, and it is therefore perhaps not without reason that these weaving designs appear to resemble hand-inked pixel images. Tipped in at the rear endpaper are two sample punch cards, and an albumen photograph depicts contemporary punch cards.

The patterns correspond in their general design to those published in contemporaneous printed collections, all of which today are of the utmost rarity. Even later editions of such books have proved almost unobtainable, as they typically remained in heavy workshop use, often for more than a century, until they literally fell to pieces. Thus, it is all the more surprising to find a manuscript specimen in such good overall condition. The quality and preservation of both fabric and designs is extremely high, with very few instances of fading or rubbing, and remarkably bright cloth. Signed on the title-page by Audibert, who was a professor at the Palais des Arts in Lyon until 1879.