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Nancy Mitford briefly attended the Slade School of Art in 1926-7, but stayed only a month. Her work was dismissed by Professor Henry Tonks, and it has become customary to assume that she had no talent for the visual arts. Nonetheless, a small oil attributed to her Slade period was sold at the Duchess of Devonshire sale in 2016 (£15,000) and is the only other painting by her we have located. Our larger picture is signed and dated 1934 and depicts blue summer flowers — rather indistinct, but perhaps bluebells, delphiniums or forget-me-nots (or a combination) with daisies — in a small porcelain vase before an ornate folding mirror in which they are reflected. It dates from a rare period of domestic happiness for Nancy. Having published two novels already, she had married Peter Rodd in December 1933 and they moved into Rose Cottage, a tiny house by the Thames at Strand on the Green, where she enjoyed furnishing it with impeccable taste on a limited budget. She evidently painted and continued to write (she published her third novel, Wigs on the Green, a facetious parody of the British Union of Fascists, in 1935). ‘The marriage was not a success. Peter, handsome and clever, was an irresponsible husband and a bore. A buccaneer by nature and incurably unfaithful, he was unable to hold down a job for more than a few weeks at a time, so that the couple were forced largely to depend on Nancy's allowance and the small income brought in by her writing’ (Selina Hastings in the Oxford DNB).

First edition of this translation and with the striking large engraved plates by Lady Diana Beauclerk. The artist was the eldest daughter of Charles Spencer, third duke of Marlborough. ‘Lady Di, as she was familiarly known, grew up at Langley Park, Buckinghamshire... There she enjoyed a happy upbringing, her taste for drawing developing early under the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ (Oxford DNB). Her second marriage to Topham Beauclerk brought her into the orbit of Edward Gibbon, David Garrick, Charles Fox, Edmund Burke, and others. Her work — often in the gothic taste — was admired by Horace Walpole who commissioned seven large panels in black wash illustrating his tragedy, The Mysterious Mother, which he hung in a special hexagonal closet at Strawberry Hill (six of them are now at the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT). She also produced designs for Josiah Wedgwood.

First authorised edition in French, the translation by Alfred Gérardin. It contains a bilingual address by Dickens giving his approbation to the translation as part of a Works series projected by Hachette, concluding: ‘This is the only edition of my writings that has my sanction. I humbly and respectfully, but with full confidence, recommend it to my French readers. Charles Dickens. Tavistock-House, London, January 17th, 1857’. It is the translation in which Oliver Twist was read by French readers into the twentieth century, though the identity of Alfred Gérardin remains obscure.

Earlier unauthorised editions had appeared in 1841 (Olivier Twist, ou l’Orphelin du depot de medicité, published by Barba) and in 1850 (Les Voleurs de Londres by Bedollière). The present Gérardin translation was issued a volume of Hachette’s of Bibliothèque des meilleurs romans étrangers in 1860 (and Monod is incorrect to state that it was first issued in 1864). cf. Sylvère Monods, ‘Les premiers traducteurs français de Dickens’, Romantisme, 1999, 29, 106, pp. 120-1. BL only in Jisc/Copac. WorldCat lists US copies at Morgan (Gordon Ray’s copy), San Diego, Chapel Hill, New Jersey State.

FIRST EDITION IN FRENCH, translated (with substantial additions) from Rowley’s Medical Advice for the Army and Navy in the present American Expedition (London, 1776). The translator, Casimir Marcassus-Puymaurin of Toulouse, explains in a preface that he was inspired to publish by the success of that book in England but also because the similarity of the climate of Georgia and Carolina considered by the army surgeon Rowley and the climate of summer in the south of France. Worldcat lists the University of Toulouse copy only.

A RARE COLLECTION PRINTED FROM THE ORIGINAL PLATES ENGRAVED BY A PRODIGIOUSLY TALENTED FEMALE ENGRAVER. ANTOINETTE [OR ANTONIA] STELLA-BAUZONNET (1641-1676) ‘was the youngest daughter of a successful French goldsmith. Despite the restrictions placed on women in art academies at the time, her family’s prominent social status allowed her and her sisters, Françoise and Claudine, to receive private training. Her uncle Jaques Stella, a painter and close friend of Nicolas Poussin, assisted his nieces and nephew in their artwork, inviting them to live in his prestigious lodgings at the Louvre. As the youngest of the children, Antoinette was additionally trained by her older siblings. The family frequently collaborated in painting, engraving, and publishing prints. Remembered for her masterfully executed aquatints and engravings, Stella suffered a tragic fall and died in Paris at the age of 35. One of Stella’s most notable works, The Entrance of the Emperor Sigismond into Mantua, 1675, consists of 33 relief-style engravings on paper depicting crowds of men, women, children, and horses traveling alongside the emperor’ (National Museum of Women in the Arts website).

Stella-Bouzonnet’s plates were prepared after drawings by her father Antoine Stella at Mantua. They were printed first in 1675 and were later purchased and reprinted by Joubert, with Chereau, in 1787 (and probably for some time after). In this copy their imprint line giving the date of the reprint has been erased. Each of the plates has been closely cut and mounted in a large album c. 1800. It is of a type (and condition) suggesting use as an artist’s model book. Both the 1675 and 1787 editions are rare.

AN UNPUBLISHED LETTER FROM ELIZABETH BUCKMINSTER DWIGHT SEDGWICK (‘E.B. SEDGWICK’) TO WILLIAM FURNESS OF PHILADELPHIA, IMPLORING HIM TO HELP THE ENGLISH ACTOR AND ABOLITIONIST FANNY KEMBLE (MRS BUTLER), then resident in Philadelphia as her marriage to the notorious philanderer and Georgia slave-owner, Pierce Butler was dissolving. Sedgwick explains Kemble’s parlous situation and the abuse she experienced at Butler’s hands. In just over 1000 words Sedgwick mentions Kemble’s abortive plan to publish her letters on her husband’s plantations, recounts news of Pierce Butler’s serial infidelities, of ‘the brutal manner in which for one year he attempted to crush her spirit’, her attempts at reconciliation for the sake of her children, her desire to not take anything from Butler by way of support and the instigation of the legal proceedings which would eventually lead to the couple’s divorce.

The writer, Elizabeth Sedgwick (1801-1864) of Lenox, was Kemble’s closest confidante, to whom Kemble addressed her famous letters (referred to here) later published as the Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation (1863). The recipient was William Furness (1802-1896), a Transcendentalist (a lifelong friend of Emerson) and a prominent abolitionist. Born in Boston in 1802, Furness graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 1823, before becoming minister of the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia at the age of 22 in 1825. He was still at Philadelphia when the desperate Fanny Kemble came to the city with her family after a disastrous visit to England in which it became apparent that her marriage to Butler was over. ‘From the time of their return to their country until her arrangement was made since I left Phil[adelphi]a, he had never furnished her with a single cent … she had not a farthing in the world’.

‘In 1838 Fanny with husband and children went to Georgia to spend the winter on their plantations. From apparently knowing nothing of slavery, she was thrown into the thick of the problem. Butler was moderately considerate to his slaves, but nothing could disguise the horrors of a system in which one man lived by owning others, treating them precisely as he fancied in order to get the best investment out of them. Worst of all, Fanny recognized that the considerable wealth the Butlers enjoyed, and to which she owed every mouthful she ate, came from the hated system. As it turned out, she spent less than four months on the plantations, but that was enough to stoke her moral indignation over the atrocities she saw. Once more, as she had done on first going to America, she kept a journal of her experiences, which in 1863 finally saw print as Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839. It is a small masterpiece of generous outrage, arguing from the amply and sympathetically documented details of what she had seen, to generalized indignation that such treatment could be tacitly encouraged by part of a civilized nation. Although it was deliberately not published in the American south, copies soon found their way there and scarcely increased admiration for the meddling of an outsider who expressed herself on what was regarded as an indigenous issue’ (Oxford DNB).

A COACHING ATLAS, IN ITS ORIGINAL TRAVELLING BINDING, providing distances, departure times of coaches and other practical information for the major routes within and around the kingdom of France, allowing the planning of coach journeys from Paris to major destinations such as Bordeaux, Toulouse, Strasbourg, London and between regions, and from Amsterdam to Marseille and Strasbourg to Vienna through France.

Desnos (1725-1805) was a prominent instrument maker and globe maker as well as a prolific cartographer. His Atlas first appeared in 1764 and was several times reprinted, each time with augmentations and modifications. This edition is described as the third on title, but the Atlas had already been published more than three times ― with a prior edition of 1765 also bearing the third edition statement. It is dedicated to astronomer and cartographer César-François Cassini de Thury (1714-1784), who was made director of the Paris Observatory in 1771. The title page describes the atlas ‘Première partie’, since Desnos later issued a volume devoted to foreign roads: Nouvel Itinéraire général comprenant toutes les grandes routes et chemins de communication des provinces de France, des Iles Britanniques, de l'Espagne, du Portugal, de l’Italie, [etc].

Bondy, p. 77; Welsh, 2012, 2788, 5569, 6481, 3312 and 5558. In the US, Worldcat lists the Wightman copy at the Morgan Library and the Adomeit copy at Indiana together with a copy at the University of Colorado.

FIRST EDITION of this delightful collection of floral poetry illustrated with unusual colour printed plates, each of two or three tints probably applied to the plate simultaneously. They are described by the online catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale as lithographs, but they appear to be a kind of stipple engraving. A couple are marked as being after drawings by Poitreau, one of the most prominent botanical artists of the era (alongside Redouté). The work is dedicated to the young salon host, collector and bibliophile, the duchesse de Berry (1798-1870). An Italian princess, she had married the duc de Berry in 1816, bearing him four children before his assassination in 1820. Her children were direct descendants of Louis XIV and thus her family were important during the Bourbon restoration as representatives of the Legitimist claim to the throne of France. She was exiled after the 1830 July Revolution and lived successively at Bath and Edinburgh before returning to Italy, where she intrigued for an unsuccessful Legitimist rebellion and a return to France.

The plates comprise: Le lis, la rose, la violette, la fleur d’oranger, la scabieuse, le bleuet, l’immortelle, la perce-neige, le soleil, les marguerites, le laurier rose, l’hortensia, le souci, l’astérie, le pavot et le narcisse and le lilas.

A privately-printed transcript of a journal kept by Thomas Fairfax, later 9th Lord Fairfax of Cameron (1762-1846). In 1802, he succeeded his father to the title of Lord Fairfax of Cameron after his father’s death. He lived the life of a country squire overseeing his 40,000 acres in Virginia and lived at Belvoir, Ash Grove, and Vaucluse. He was 37 when he made the journey written up in a small notebook still in the possession of the Fairfax family in England. He travelled from Fairfield (Va) by land and water, taking ship from Norfolk to Newport and then continuing by coach making brief descriptions of Providence, Boston, Norwich, New London, New Haven, Fairfield and so on.

A RARE PHOTOGRAPHIC PANORAMA OF CONSTANTINOPLE. Taken from the Serasker or Beyazit Tower beside the Ottoman Ministry of War, the 360-degree panorama first looks north-west to the Süleymaniye mosque an across the Golden Horn, and sweeps clockwise) eastwards, taking in Galata, the Grand Bazaar, the Seraglio, Scutari in the distance on the Asian shore, Hagia Sophia, Sultan Ahmet (Blue) and Beyazit mosques, before returning to the square of Ministry of War and an alternate view of Süleymaniye. Though not signed it is similar to the panoramas issues by Sebah and Joallier in the 1870s and 1880s. Constantiople panoramas are more commonly taken from the Galata tower on the northern shore of the Golden Horn, where as this one looks from the southern shore.

A RARE ‘PHYSIONOTRACE’ PORTRAIT OF THEODORE SEDGWICK (1746–1813), the American attorney, politician, and jurist who served in elected state government and as a delegate to the Continental Congress, a U.S. representative, and a senator from Massachusetts. He served as President pro tempore of the United States Senate from June to December 1798. He also served as the fourth speaker of the United States House of Representatives. He was appointed to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 1802 and served there for the rest of his life. He died at Boston and he is buried at Stockbridge. A portrait by Gilbert Stuart of c. 1808 is at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Sedgwick studied theology and law at Yale College and though he did not graduate, he continued in his study under attorney Mark Hopkins of Great Barrington. He played a significant role in the abolitionist movement. As a relatively young lawyer, Sedgwick and Tapping Reeve had pleaded the case of Brom and Bett vs. Ashley (1781), an early ‘freedom suit’, in county court for the slaves Elizabeth Freeman (known as Bett) and Brom. Bett (also known as MumBet)was a black slave who had fled from her master, Colonel John Ashley of Sheffield, Massachusetts, because of cruel treatment by his wife. Brom joined her in suing for freedom from the Ashleys. The attorneys challenged their enslavement under the new state constitution of 1780, which held that ‘all men are born free and equal.’ The jury agreed and ruled that Bett and Brom were free. The decision was upheld on appeal by the state Supreme Court. She was the first enslaved African American to file and win a freedom suit in Massachusetts. She marked her freedom by taking the name of Elizabeth Freeman, and chose to work for wages at the Sedgwick household, where she helped rear their several children. She worked there for much of the rest of her life, buying a separate house for her and her daughter after the Sedgwick children were grown. On her death the Sedgwicks buried her at Stockbridge Cemetery in the family plot.

Before the advent of photography the physionotrace was ‘the first system invented to produce multiple copies of a portrait, invented in 1786 by Gilles-Louis Chrétien (1774–1811). In his apparatus a profile cast by a lamp onto a glass plate was traced by an operator using a pointer connected, by a system of levers like a pantograph, to an engraving tool moving over a copper plate. The aquatint and roulette finished engraved intaglio plate, usually circular and small (50 mm), with details of features and costume, could be inked and printed many times’ (Photoconservation.com, sub Printing Processes).

The miniaturist Saint-Mémin (1770-1852) had emigrated from France in 1793 to Switzerland, where he practised as an engraver. Crossing the Atlantic to Canada and then the United States, he established a portrait business in New York with his compatriot Thomas Bluget de Valdenuit (who initially produced the drawings for Saint-Mémin to engrave). When Valdenuit returned to Paris, Saint-Mémin adopted an itinerant practice all over the East Coast states, working variously at Philadelphia, Richmond, Charleston and Burlington. He too returned to France in 1814, having destroyed his drawing apparatus in a symbolic end to a prolific artistic enterprise which produced more than a thousand different portraits of significant figures in American society, including Washington, Revere and Jefferson.
fferent portraits of significant figures in American society, including Washington, Revere and Jefferson.

A large broadside advertisement for a French provincial entertainment, purportedly drawn from the worldwide travels of its animateur. ‘M. Saunier, Professeur de Physique, le seul qui a donné ses expériences ans les quatre parties du Monde, (l’Europe, l’Asie, l’Afrique et l’Amérique,) devenu, depuis sa rentrée en France, interprête des Etrangers et Membre de la Société sur la rapport des Découvertes des quatre Nations, donnera demain sa premiere représentation de son Spectacle unique pour l’adresse’.
Saunier’s advertised performance is also notable for a performance on the ‘Harmonica’ – at this date a version of the large ‘Armonica’, consisting of revolving concentric glass bowls, invented by Benjamin Franklin in 1761. With its ethereal and unsettling tone, the Armonica was widely manufactured in America and Europe. Working on the principle of vibration caused by rubbing the finger around the rim of a glass vessel, the instrument combined a large number of such vessels on a revolving spindle to form a kind of keyboard capable of playing quite complex pieces as well as creating atmospheric sound effects suitable for the theatre, the opera and travelling shows such as Saunier’s.

Sole edition of this eccentric elementary musical tutor for children, presenting a series of visual mnemonics for key musical ideas. Plates produced by C. Chabot, zincographer, Skinner Street.

First edition of a very rare gothic romance set in England by an author who described herself as a ‘portière’ (or concierge). Julienne Bayoud is known to have published two novels, the present Fidélia (1822) and Céline (1823). Fidélia was quite well reviewed in Revue encyclopédique, 14 (1822), in which it was noted that given the lowly status of the the author as a portière the novel’s style demanded surprisingly little indulgence on behalf of the reader, and that it contained much that was lacking in contemporary novels of its type. Beyond the address given in the imprint, little is known of the circumstances of Mme. Bayoud. Pigoreau names her as the daughter of a humble hat maker and posts that she must have been self-taught, while complimenting the novel’s pure and elegant style. The five corrections in a contemporary hand found in our copy do not follow a printed errata, and may just be authorial. Pigoreau, Deuxième supplément à la Petite Bibliographie biographico-romancière de Pigoreau (15 February 1822, pp. 31-2). Worldcat lists copies in the Bibliothèque nationale, Frankfurt, Goettingen and Leipzig but none outside continental Europe.

First edition, rare, of an epistolary novel by a Frenchman in London, who was variously described as a diplomat, an adventurer and a spy. Treyssac de Vergy had come to England at the time when a circle of French diplomats, including the Comte de Guerchy and the Chevalier D’Eon were making themselves notorious by involving the English courts in their interpersonal disagreements. Vergy was widely accused of being hired by de Guerchy to make an attempt on the Chevalier D’Eon’s life. He wrote several sentimental novels in English, including The Lovers and The Scotchman both noted in the preliminaries of the first volume here. Dedicated to Lady Harriet Stanhope, the novel was reprinted in Dublin in the same year and again in London on 1785 as part of The Novelist’s Magazine. ESTC: British Library, Bodley and Paxton House (Scottish Borders) only, Worldcat adds no more.

A popular guide to writing love letters, intended for the use of young men and women. Presented in pairs, there are numerous letter samples, usually from the the man to the woman, with her response. There is a useful synoptic table of the several types of love, together with a description of several invisible inks or ‘encres sympathiques’. Cf. Gay, III, 821 (editions of 1825 and 1842, attributed to Cuisin). The Bibliothèque nationale catalogue lists editions of 1825 and 1837 (but not our edition). All editions appear very rare.

A DELIGHTFUL BOOK-FORM BOX, complete with gilt spine bands, gilt borders to the sides, four gilt bosses (one on the upper cover apparently missing) and gilt edges. The lid incorporates a mirror and the base a hand coloured print.

First edition of a rare lithographed work, pseudonymously issued, but the artist/author James O’Hara is identified in this copy with a contemporary manuscript key. The album is in the form of a graphic narrative recording a yachting cruise from Ireland to Iceland by a group of friends aboard Captain Henry’s Maroquita (a fine two-masted schooner wrecked in Holyhead harbour in 1860). While the initial scenes depict the voyage out (with predictible sea-sickness) most of the images are Icelandic vignettes, with local characters and landmarks. One shows a member of the party photographing geysers with a tripod camera — surely an early record of photography in Iceland.

The manuscript key identifies the four sailors, ‘Smith, Jones, Robinson and Brown’ as James O’Hara, Captain Sandes, Mr. Lane Fox and Captain Henry, ‘proprietor of the yacht Maroquita’ respectively. The National Library of Ireland copy bears the imprint ‘Wm. Robertson’. WorldCat locates only the copy in the Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek, Cologne, which has the imprint of Robertson of Sackville Street, Dublin at the foot of the title-page (where ours is blank). There is also a copy in the National Library Ireland (also with Robertson imprint). No copy found in the National Library of Iceland Catalogue.

A charming book-form trinket box, of unknown manufacture, but with other examples known to have been marketed in London in the late nineteenth-century. The monogram reads ‘M.S.’ (though admittedly it could also be ‘S.M.’) and it has been plausibly suggested that the reference is to Mary Queen of Scots, given the all-over thistle pattern. Mary was executed in 1587 and so it is just possible that these boxes were in some way marketed at the time of the three-hundredth anniversary, though we can do no more than offer this as a suggestion.