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― An Act for establishing certain Regulations for the better Management of the Affairs of the East India Company, as well in India as in Europe. London: Charles Eyre and William Strahan, 1773. Folio (318 × 195 mm), pp. [2]. 1299-1327, [1] including general title with woodcut royal arms.
― An Act for the better Regulation and Management of the Affairs of the East India Company, and of the British Possessions in India; and for establishing a Court of Judicature for the more speedy and effectual Trial of Persons accused of Offences committed in the East Indies. [London, 1784]. Folio (310 × 195 mm), pp. 351-395, [1]. Without general title.
― An Act for the better Government of India. [2^nd August 1858.] [London: George Edward Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1858]. Folio (301 × 186 mm), pp. [1], 854-874. Woodcut arms to head of first page.

First editions of the three British Parliamentary Acts which shaped the colonial history of India ― first entrusting government to the East India Company, then establishing power-sharing between the Company and the British government, and finally establishing direct British rule and the Raj after the rebellion of 1857 (the so-called ‘Indian Mutiny). ‘The act of 1773, also known as the Regulating Act, set up a governor-general of Fort William in Bengal with supervisory powers over Madras (now Chennai) and Bombay (now Mumbai). Pitt’s India Act (1784), named for the British prime minister William Pitt the Younger, established the dual system of control by the British government and the East India Company, by which the company retained control of commerce and day-to-day administration but important political matters were reserved to a secret committee of three directors in direct touch with the British government; this system lasted until 1858 … The act of 1858 transferred most of the company’s powers to the crown.’ (Britannica). 
Though separately published with a general title for a complete sitting of Parliament, individual Acts of Parliament were paginated to be bound together in yearly volumes hence the paginations here. Of the two eighteenth-century acts, only the first retains its general title. All three acts preserved in recent wrappers to style.

First published in 1819, Le Poupée bien élevée proved popular among children on both sides of the English Channel, with numerous editions in both French and English (the latter as The Well Bred Doll). Jeanne Sophie Mallès de Beaulieu (176-1825) was the author of numerous moral and entertaining stories for children including Le Robinson de douze ans (1820).

Danish artist and cloud classifier Philippe Weilbach was an amateur meteorologist who takes a significant part in the history of recording clouds and other atmospheric phenomena. Among other observations he was the first to describe and define the cumulonimbus cloud, published here in this memoir containing a history of cloud study (noting it began with Lamarck and the Englishman, Luke Howard) and his own observations from Copenhagen and elsewhere. It first appeared with only three plates in the Annuaire de l’Institut météorologique du Danemark and was reprinted with the fourth plate (with the image of the cumulonimbus cloud) in the Annales du Bureau central Météorologique de France for 1880 from which this a contemporaneously bound extract.

The author participated in the 1891 Munich meeting of the International Meteorological Committee, which culminated in the publication of the first International Cloud Atlas in 1896.

A spectacular album containing 65 views and scenes in Northern India at the close of the nineteenth century, with superb images of Benares, Lucknow, Cawnpore, Agra, Delhi and Mussoorie. together with several fine photographs of Indian workers, notably in the tea plantations of Chaubatia. Included is a series of haunting images of the ruins of the imperial residency at Lucknow, which was largely destroyed in the Indian rebellion of 1857, and a view of the site of the massacre at Cawnpore. The first two photographs in the album are signed in ink by G.W. Lawrie and given the style, period and geography of the remainder it is likely they are also by the studio of this prolific Scottish-born photographer. Six final photographs are of Port Said, Egyptians, Armenians and are Sudanians, of which some after French photographer Hippolyte Arnoux.
1. Juggernaut Cr. Mysore. 2. A Mysore temple. 3. Marble rocks. Jubbulpore. 4. Indore. Tomb of the late Mahraja [Tukojirao Holkar II]. 5. View from Cheena. ‘Naini Tal’. 6. Naini Tal. 7. Loucun. Naini Tal. 8. Naini Tal – showing lake. 9. Group of hill coolies. 10. Naini Tal group of hill women. 11. A picturesque bit on the road from Ranikhet. 12. Grass cutters. Chowbattia. 13. Group of women sorting tea. Chowbattia. 14. Tea sorting. Chowbattia. 15. Simla. 16. Bridge of boats. Benares. 17. The great mosque of Aurenzebe [Aurangzebe]. Benares. 18. Benares. Cremation Ghal. Showing Hindu burning their dead. 19. Buddhist carving. Benares. 20. Golden temple. Benares. 21. Bailey Guard Gate. Lucknow. 22. The Residency. Lucknow. 23. The Residency Ruins. Lucknow. 24. The Residency. Lucknow. 25. Lucknow. The Residency showing the Shannon’s guns. 26. Interior view of Fort. Lucknow. 27. Lucknow. The great Emambara & Mosque. 28. View from clock tower. Lucknow. 29. A gateway. Lucknow. 30. A gateway. Lucknow [untitled, another view]. 31. The Hossainabad. Lucknow. 32. Hossainabad Emambara. Lucknow. 33. Wingfield Park. Lucknow. 34. Lucknow. The first King of Oudh, Mausoleum. 35. Dilkoosha Palace ruins. Lucknow. 36. Dilkoosha Palace. Lucknow. 37. Sadut Ali Shah’s Mausoleum. Lucknow. 38. Ornamental Gate. Lucknow. 39. Memorial Well. Cawnpore. 40. Suttee Chowra Ghat. Scene of the Massacre. Cawnpore. 41. Gateway of Taj. Agra. 42. The Marble Taj. Agra. 43. The Taj from the river. Agra. 44. Agra. The marble screen around the tomb inside Taj. 45. Motte Musjid Mosque. Agra. 46. The Mausoleum of Akbar. Secundra [Sikandra]. 47. Elephant in masonry. Delhi. 48. The Cashmere Gate. Delhi. 49. Arhai-din-kar-jhopra temple. Ajmere. 50. Ancient carved pillars, in the fortress. Gwalior. 51. The Mall. Mussoorie. 52. A bit of bazaar. Mussoorie. 53. General view. Mussoorie. 54. Kempty Falls. Mussoorie. 55. General view. Mussoorie. 56. The snow. Cashmere. 57. Cashmere. 58. Cashmere. 59 & 60. Indian Servants (2 smaller images 150 × 110 mm). 61 & 62. Indian Servants (2 smaller images 150 × 110 mm). 63 & 64. Indian Servants (2 images 150 × 110 mm). 64 & 65. Goorkha. Indian Soldiers (2 images 150 × 110 mm). 66. Port Said. 67. Armenian Girl. 68. Armenians. 69. Egyptian water carrier (after Arnoux). 70. Egyptians (after Arnoux). 71. Soudaniens. (after Arnoux).

A series of eighteen superb photographs of processions of Indian princes and soldiers at the Delhi Durbar. The 1903 Durbar was held to commemorate the coronation of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra as Emperor and Empress of India --- the King and Queen did not attend but were represented by the Duke of Connaught and the Viceroy Lord Curzon (both appearing in these photographs). Many of the Indian princes rode on elephants (depicted in six of the photographs here) and were dressed in their finest costumes and jewels. Three of the prints depict the Durbar amphitheatre and Viceroy’s pavilion forming a panorama of connected images. The Durbar was also the occasion for the opening of the Delhi exhibition, the biggest display of Indian arts and crafts hitherto assembled, and the exhibition building is the subject of two of the prints here.

Photographer Sidney Herbert Dagg (1862-1930) moved to India in 1891 and worked as an assistant to G.W.Lawrie (G. W. Lawrie & Co) before establishing his own firm, with offices at Mussoorie and Allahabad.

A curious copy of this popular edition, removed from its original boards or wrappers at an early date and placed in a board chemise with ties and manuscript labels, perhaps for a personal or circulating library.

First edition of this important attempt at a universal non-sectarian liturgy, inspired by David Williams and Benjamin Franklin’s London Philosophical ‘Club of Thirteen’. It extended Williams’s experiments as minister to a Highgate Presbyterian congregation, reflecting contemporary debates around the Thirty-Nine Articles, and was widely influential notably in France, where it was applauded by both Rousseau and Voltaire.

The Club of Thirteen was a Radical intellectual club, rather like the Birmingham Lunar Society, and its members included Williams, Franklin, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Josiah Wedgwood, Robert Owen, William Hodgson, and Thomas Day. It met at Old Slaughter's Coffee House on St Martin's Lane, or at the Swan at Westminster Bridge.

‘On Easter Sunday, 7 April 1776, Williams opened a chapel in Margaret Street, Cavendish Square, and read from the Liturgy on the Universal Principles of Religion and Morality, the collaborative production of members of the Club of Thirteen... The preface to this universalist Liturgy of 1776 describes the experiment as a form of social worship 'in which all men may join who acknowledge the existence of a supreme intelligence, and the universal obligations of morality' (Liturgy, x–xi). Its format, containing an order for morning and for evening prayer and a collection of hymns and psalms, is reminiscent of an Anglican format, but the liturgy avoids all dogmatic statements of belief beyond an acknowledgement of the wisdom and goodness of a supreme intelligence and the moral obligations of a simple deism that celebrates nature as implying the existence of God. All specifically Christian doctrines of faith are carefully excluded. Copies of the liturgy were sent to Voltaire and Frederick the Great of Prussia, and in Paris in the summer of 1776 Bentley presented a copy to Rousseau. All three responded enthusiastically. Voltaire wrote: It is a great comfort to me, at the age of eighty-two years, to see the tolerance openly teach’d in your country, and the God of all mankind no more pent up in a narrow tract of land. That notable truth was worthy of your pen and of your tongue’ (Oxford DNB). Though quite well-represented in British collections, ESTC lists US copies at Union Theological Seminary and Penn only; Worldcat adds Columbia, Yale and Emory. It is notably scarce in commerce with Rare Book Hub recording no copies at auction.

Sole edition of a rare illustrated poetical collection by a so-far unidentified woman of the English community at the Breton town of Dinan. The subscribers list contains 52 names, mainly English and mainly women. The romantic plates are very accomplished but unsigned, save by the printer Mainoë at Nantes. They are captioned with excerpts from the verses. No UK copies located by JISC/COPAC.

First edition, one of 275 copies on Hollande (after 20 on Japon) signed by the artist, additionally inscribed by him to French politician Joseph Paul-Boncour in 1927 with a pen sketch and six additional drawings, plus some of the illustrations with captions overwritten by the artist in pencil. Réquin’s collection is valuable as a record of the wide range of nationalities present in the Northern France campaigns in 1917. There are portraits of French, Belgian, British, Scots and Welsh soldiers, but also North African, Sengalese, Indian, Russian, and Turkish troops. This copy was evidently given by the artist to Paul-Boncour as a participant in the 1927 Geneva Conference on arms limitation. Réquin adds six drawings, including four satirical sketches of the Geneva Conference itself (which he probably attended as an official artist). These large sketches include portraits of some of the major participants, including the Eton and Oxford-educated British diplomat Robert Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, one of the architects of the League of Nations. JISC/Copac locates no UK copies.

Second and enlarged edition, which includes the first edition of the second part, on bookbinding (the first edition was published by the author at Dijon in 1818). Mairet’s is one of the important early accounts of lithography with a detailed account of the processes of preparation, the application of images to the stone and of the printing itself (with a plate of a lithographic press). Despite the importance of his treatise on lithography, Mairet is best known as a binder. A native of Dijon, he established himself as a binder and paper-dealer around the year 1806, he later worked mainly as a paper manufacturer. ‘He published, among other works, an Essai sur la reliure et leblanchissement des livres [the present book] in 1824, much of which was used by Lenormand and embodied in the Roret Manuels on Binding... he is probably the greatest binder of the time in the use of classical motives, and his work has much charm and delicacy’ (Ramsden, French Bookbinders, p. 133). The Essai sur la reliure is particularly valuable as a first-hand account of contemporary methods of colouring binding materials and producing decorative effects such marbling on both paper and leather. Bigmore & Wyman II, 14 (’The new edition was printed in a far superior manner to the old one, and the plates are much better executed... Copies are now seldom met with’); Pollard, Early Bookbinding Manuals 52; Twyman Lithography 1800-1850, pp. 92-95.

First edition, one of 150 unnumbered copies on Arnold’s hand-made paper (of which 140 were for sale). All the woodblocks and vellum copies were burnt in the Ballantyne Press fire of December 1899. This copy is from the library of Uranian poet and publisher Francis Edwin Murray. Watry B28; Ransom, Vale Press, 28; Tomkinson, Vale Press, 28

First edition of this typographical innovation by a radical editor, in which the text, including the titles and all the verses, is presented at ninety degrees to the usual disposition. The 12-syllable lines being too long for a traditional small format book, the format allows the verses to be read with the book held with the gutter running left to right (rather than top to bottom). Many of the quatrains are by Maréchal himself and he adds a short section of verses by French women at the end: Louise Labé, Catherine Des Roches, Jeanne D’Albret, Marie de Gournay, Henriette de Coligny de La Suze, Madéleine de Scudéry and Antoinette-Thérèse Deshoulières.

This is a rare work by the utopian anarchist Maréchal (1750–1803), ‘one of the most audacious sophists of the 18th century’ (Biographie universelle). It was published in the same year as his notorious Livre échappé au déluge, the indecent parody of the prophets which lost him his position as sub-librarian at the Collège Mazarin. He thereafter lived by his pen and became known as one of the early utopian socialists and an enthusiastic supporter of Babeuf’s anarchist program. Conlon, Prélude au siècle des lumières en France, 84:578, not in Brunet or Quérard. Worldcat lists copies at UC Berkeley, University of Minnesota and Wayne State only outside continental Europe.

A stunning album of views of Mount Fuji, pictured in sequential stages of the year in changing atmospheric conditions. The woodblocks are prepared and printed with unusual care, and the subtle gradations of tone and shade visible in the mountain and its clouds are interpreted through variable inking and impressions of the blocks on soft, translucent paper. The preface by Chōshū Kobayashi explains that the artist Oishi Shuga observed the mountain over three hundred days, from winter to spring and back to spring, studying their changing clouds and atmosphere.

This is an early issue of this celebrated but bibliographically complicated book and is dated Bunsei 5 [1822], the date of the first editions. It is probably impossible to ascribe primacy to the known copies of the various issues which exhibit numerous variations among blocks, impressions and configuration. Ours show excellent impressions of the fine black lines printed while the blocks were still in good condition and a pleasing subtlety in the inking of the wash-like infills. Copies surveyed are all different and can contain between 15 and 33 double-page plates, sometimes with captions, sometimes without, and with a range of tints and colours — ours is primarily black and grey with some tints for the clouds. Our issue also contains an afterword not present in all copies by the artist himself in which he explains that he had seen Mount Fuji from many points of view but that Suruga city is the best vantage point, and he offers a classification of the clouds, their names and shapes and of the various weather conditions he observes. cf. Hillier, Art of the Japanese Book II, pp. 872-3 (another variant, with fewer plates, incorrectly attributed to Myuoo Shuga).

First edition of the first British act of legislation to deal specifically with the provision of education in England and Wales. It instituted schooling for children between the ages of five and twelve, established local education authorities with defined powers and authorized public money to improve existing schools. Most importantly, it demonstrated a commitment to compulsory provision on a national scale. Introduced by Liberal politician William Forster (and sometimes referred to as ‘Forster’s Act’) it also marks an important milestone in the history of literacy and literature, and has been seen as a primary stimulant of the growth in reading and of popular fiction for a mass market.

First edition of this rare little treatise of cat lore by an author who describes herself as a portière and which is dedicated to the ‘Dames, veuves et demoiselles françaises et étrangères’. It is full of practical advice on behaviour, diet and health and is proceeded by a literary and historial éloge and ended by a drama for a cast of cats: ‘Les Chats, tragédie lyrique’. One chapter gives detailed instructions for feline taxidermy. Worldcat lists the Penn library copy as the only location outside continental Europe.

First editions of two rare reports to the Directoire by a French journalist who lost his living after the Revolution and who joined a diplomatic mission to Constantinople ― before being captured by the English fleet and imprisoned for four years in Corsica. Moeurs et coutumes des Corses is a highly critical account of the Corsicans and their culture is inscribed to the author’s wife and daughter, who shared his island captivity. Feydel berates the insular character of his captors and the ‘maux affreux et presque désespérés de la nation corse’ whose only hope of salvation could be through lois simples et savantes qu’il tiendra de la force et de la sollicitude’. The frontispiece depicts Corsican brigands in characteristic capes and hoods. Moeurs et coutumes des Corses was reprinted [without the plate] in 1802. The second work is bracingly anti-British and describes England as ‘dernier ennemi de la France’.

Carmine Starace, Bibliografia della Corsica 8300. Outside Europe, Worldcat locates the Yale copy only of Moeurs and no copies of De notre situation.

First edition of this rare posthumous sale catalogue of the notable collection of prints amassed by the voracious Lille collector Libert de Beaumont (1742-1798) --- now widely dispersed among collections around the world. Aside from master prints by the likes of Durer, Rembrandt and Callot Liber de Beaumont was an enthusiastic collector of British prints and the catalogue includes sections devoted to Bartolozzi (including numerous prints after Angelika Kauffman), Earlom, Burke, Tomkins, Smyth, Caroline Watson, Knight and many others. The sale included a fine section of medals and another of shells.

‘Il amassa la plus considérable collection iconographique qu'il soit permis à un particulier de posséder. Pendant plus de trente années il n’a cessé de l'accroître : nulle peine, nul sacrifice ne l’arrêtaient quand il s’agissait d'acquérir une belle pièce qu'il n’avait pas. L’on raconte encore aujourd'hui à Lille qu’il arriva un jour que pour obtenir l'oeuvre d’un maître quil désirait, il vendit une bonne et belle ferme en plein rapport; (Archives historiques et littéraires du nord de la France, 1837, p. 241).
Lugt 5807; Getty Provenance Index F-A1186; Duplessis 2081.

A very rare Rouen edition in English of Avantures de Télémaque, apparently a direct piracy of the London seventh edition by Rivington, Johnson, Newbery et al, with the same pagination and complete with the ’Discourse of epic Poetry’ by Andrew Ramsay. While the pagination is identical this is almost certainly French typography, with characteristic fleurons. Jean-Jacques Besongne is an interesting figure, from a long-established family of Rouen printers, but who was to go bankrupt later in 1784 and move to Paris where he published several polemics on the freedom of the press. A letter survives from him to Benjamin Franklin (9 March 1780) asking his assistance in liquidating his entire stock to form a French library in America. It is not known if Franklin responded. There are two issues of this edition, one giving Besogne’s name only in the imprint (ESTC T153158, copies at BL and Bayerische Staatsbibliothek only) and this one (ESTC N54940, copy at University of Florida only).

This copy contains the twentieth-century bookplate of the wartime Swedish consul in Majorca, Carl Fryberg and an additional inscription from his wife Signe to the acting British consul Ivan Lake dated 1943. At some point (it is impossible to say when) a corner of page 281 has been turned down marking the text ‘Alas! cried Telemachus, lo! the evils which war draws after it! How blind a fury possesses wretched mortals! They have but a few days to live on the earth, and those are days of sorrow; why then will they quicken the pace of death which is already so near? Why will they add so many shocking evils to the bitterness with which the Gods have crowed their span of life! Men are all brothers, and yet they tear each other in pieces...’

A journey through Napoleonic-era Europe as a striking large-format engraved ‘Game of Goose’. The sixty three game squares include the Imperial palace at St Petersburg, the cathedral at Moscow, Westminster Bridge, the Dublin Exchange, Edinburgh cathedral, several French cathedrals, the mosque of Hagia Sofia at Constantinople, concluding with the Arc de Triomphe (which was commissioned by Napoleon in 1806 and was still under construction at the time of publication) with a view of the Palais Impérial des Tulieries beyond. The arch is surmounted by the imperial eagle. The print is undated but was advertised in the Journal de l’Imprimerie in 1813. De Vinck, pag. 50, n°120.

A striking and moving memorial to a young boy, a vision of a child’s paradise with chromolithograph scrapbook cuttings of birds, horses, children, dancers, flowers and foliage, together with cuttings of hair (some woven). It combines two popular Victorian domestic crafts of hair art and scrapbooking, within an accomplished (but probably also domestic) wooden frame in the gothic style. With it supersized hair-carrying birds dwarfing diminutive dancers this is an inadvertently unsettling piece of Victorian naïve art.