Les Incas : ou, la destruction de l'empire du Pérou / par Marmontel
A French prose romance by Jean-François Marmontel, published in Tours by Mame et Cie in 1843 and aimed at a general readership. The picture is the ornate gilt cover decoration of the binding, not an illustration from the text: a central oval medallion of stylised flower petals surrounded by scrolled foliate borders in gold on a dark blue ground. A designer could take from it the density and symmetry of nineteenth-century cover tooling, with its radiating petals and repeating scrollwork.
