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First edition of this commentary on the customary law of Lorraine, by Pierre Canon ‘juge adsesseur au bailliage de Vosges’. With the rise of feudalism in medieval France, the country evolved into two distinct judicial territories. The provincial parliaments in northern and nestern France, such as that of Lorraine, acted as sovereign judicial bodies independent of each other and claimed independence from the king, applying droit coutumier, or legal principles derived from local customs and privileges. The customs of Lorraine were ‘codified in 1594 under the auspices of Charles III, duke of Lorraine. The coutume of Lorraine included three general coutumes, those of the bailliages of Nancy, Vosges, and Allemagne’ (cf. The Coutumes of France in the Library of Congress, Caswell & Sipkov. 1977, p. 55).

The annotations in this copy appear to be in a single early hand, giving running headlines to most right-hand pages, plus further headings in the left and right margins, together with numerous calligraphic asterisks, some in leadpoint, some in ink. There also three records of proceeding relating to customary law at the rear, incuding one (dated 1667) concerning taxation wrongly exacted by the Abbess and Convent of Bouxidre (unidentified) on local inhabitants. A slightly later hand has added a very neat table of contents (perhaps at the time of binding). Gouron & Terrin. Coutumes, 1111; LC Coutumes, 451. Rare: George Washington University and Library of Congress only outside continental Europe.

First edition of the St Omer Pharmacopoeia, an exceptionally rare book. Printed from a manuscript (hence the ‘correcta’ of the title page) it consists of 686 remedies according to the materia medica and Galenic principles. It forms part of the distinct culture of city pharmacopoeias of the Southern Netherlands — Saint Omer being a part of the Burgundian, then Spanish Netherlands until the Peace of Nijmegen in 1678.

This copy is complete with the final leaf giving the names of seven doctors and six pharmacists at St Omer: ‘Nobilissimi aeqissimi domini, Vestri Humillimi & obesrvantissimi Clientes MEDICI & PHARMACOPOEI sub scripti...’ This leaf is not mentioned by Daems & Vendewiele and is lacking in the copy digitised by the library of St Omer. The printer was Louis Carlier, whose family printed a number of works (including a handful in English) alongside the more prolific English College Press. Despite this, no member of the Carlier family is mentioned in the Répertoire d’imprimeurs/libraires (Bibliothèque nationale, new edition, 2004).

Among the preparations are theriac and mythridatium, both considered universal antidotes (or heal-alls) based on ancient recipes. The Theriaca Andromachi Senioris contains viper flesh and opium, as well as over 50 other ingredients (including spices, autumn crocus and other flowers, gums and roots). Itsrecipe was based on ancient Egyptian and classical models and by the seventeenth century its preparation was a central function of European city pharmacists, often attended by considerable ceremony and civic pride. The book also includes a list of all medicines sold in Saint Omer: ‘Taxa seu pretium medicamentorum in hac pharmacopeia contentorum’ allowing a comparison of their prices and values in French currency. Daems & Vandewiele, Noord- en Zuidnederlandse stedlijke Pharmacopoeeë (1955), 177. No copy found in KVK or Worldcat. There are two copies in the public libraries of St Omer and probably two more in the library of the Société d’histoire de la pharmacie in Paris (though not found in their online catalogue). No copy appears in the online catalogues of the Bibliothèque nationale, the Wellcome library or the National Library of Medicine.

First edition in French of Aphorismes Civill and Militarie (London, 1613) comprising 246 political and military aphorisms selected from the Italian historian Guicciardini, designed to teach the lessons of history in a pithy and pragmatic form, in the spirit of Montaigne. The original had been dedicated by the English courtier Robert Dallington to Henry, Prince of Wales and later also to Prince Charles. Mouchemberg’s free translation, retaining the structure of the original, with glosses and apparatus, was dedicated to Antoine Coiffier-Ruzé, Marquis d’Effiat, who had negotiated the marriage of the Prince of Wales (later Charles I) with Louis XIII’s sister, Henrietta Maria of France in 1625. Mouchemberg later published a continuation of another British work — Argenis by John Barclay.

Dallington (1561-1636) is an interesting figure in European literary culture. Initially educated at Cambridge (Corpus Christi College) but without taking a degree, he published translations from the Hypnerotomachia as The Strife of Love in 1592, dedicated to the memory of Sir Philip Sidney and to the Earl of Essex (into whose circle he was drawn). He made at least two grand tours, one in a party with Inigo Jones. His View of France was first published in 1604 and his Survey of … Tuscany in 1605, both written for private circulation. Rare: Worldcat lists the British Library as the only location outside continental Europe, with no North American copies.

First editions of two significant anticlerical polemics. Factum pour les religieuses de Sainte-Catherine-lès-Provins is a celebrated example of the power of popular print over conventional legal process. In the 1660s a faction of nuns at Saint-Catherine sought to overthrow the tyranny of their abbess who was in league with the local Franciscans. Unable to access regular legal channels (as women and nuns) they appealed directly to the local parlement with this devastating Factum detailing a host of abuses committed by the Franciscans in their convent. The Factum was ‘purportedly addressed to their judges but intended for broad public distribution. In it they charged that the Franciscans ran Sainte-Catherine as a personal brothel, seducing and sometimes physically forcing the nuns into sexual relationships with friars while simultaneously plundering the convent’s treasury. The titillating Factum pour les religieuses de Sainte-Catherine-lès-Provins contre les pères cordeliers told a story that borrowed narrative inspiration from contemporary novels and pornography. It quickly became a sensation. The Franciscan order denounced the work as an illegal defamatory libel, and most copies of the original appear to have been seized and burned. But the Factum was quickly bootlegged, became a hot commodity in the clandestine book trade and earned, from the evidence of its multiple editions, a very broad readership (Tuttle). Indeed, several early editions survive, almost all issued without genuine imprints, and the first edition is extremely rare. Among the nuns’ many complaints is the accusation that friars brought pornographic books into the convent including Maximes d'amour, L’Ecole des filles and Catechisme d’amour and that one of them supplied a novice with a cipher to ‘write filth’ (pour écrire des ordures).

Elixir Jesuiticum also issued without a formal imprint was directed against the Jesuits and contains an interesting dedication to English Archbishop William Laud. Factum: cf. Gay II, 225 and see Tuttle, ‘From Cloister to Court: Nuns and the Gendered Culture of Disputing in Early Modern France.’ Journal of Women's History (2010) 22, 2, pp. 11-33; Elixir Jesuiticum: VD17 12:115207Y

First edition. This copy with the inscription to the first volume: ‘Philip James Digby Wykeham from his sincere friend and schoolfellow Henry W. May on his leaving Eton. Election Saturday 1859.’

John Payne’s translation, published by the Villon Society fro private circulation (number 174).

First published in 1745, Gaillard’s was a popular guide to rhetoric for the use of young women. This copy has an early female gift/ownership inscription. Though many of the examples in the guide are traditional examples of rhetorical excellence, the introduction provides and interesting discourse on celebrated female rhetorician, mentioning Elizabeth I of England as a supposed translator of Sophocles and Marie Stuart’s Latin oration at the French royal court.

First edition of this children’s allegory of female education by one of the most prominent early British suffragists. Marion Wallace-Dunlop was involved in the suffrage movement from 1900 (the year after this book appeared) and was thrice imprisoned at Holloway: first, in 1908 for obstruction and second, in 1909 for stencilling an extract from the Bill of Rights onto the wall of St. Stephen’s Hall, Westminster. During her second incarceration she was the first suffragist to go on a hunger strike. In November 1911 she helped to organise a window-smashing campaign and was imprisoned once more and in 1928 she was a pallbearer at Emmeline Pankhurst’s funeral.

The Magic Fruit Garden is a ‘fairy tale about a girl struggling to write an essay on ‘Perseverance’. In her quest for wisdom, Doc finds a magic fruit garden where knowledge-fruit grows on bushes and trees. Here she picks ‘geography-plums and history-apples and grammar-pears and all the time her knowledge of everything kept growing bigger and bigger’. In a glass conservatory, Doc encounters piles of sweets ‘made from mixtures of the various fruits in the garden boiled in a syrup called Research. There was botany-sugar, zoology-candy, geology-toffee, and sugar-plums of every kind and colour’. When she gets home, her brother tells Doc it was only a dream and remarks that it’s ‘just like a girl to think that a dream is real. However, he then embarks on an adventure of his own which forces him to admit the magic garden is real (from the website of the University College London Exhibition, Disrupters and Innovators, 2018). Dunlop’s printed dedication reads simply: ‘To my Mother’.

‘Marion Wallace-Dunlop studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1903 (when she also exhibited a painting at the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts), and in 1905 and 1906. Her paintings were also exhibited in Paris. She illustrated in art nouveau style two books, Fairies, Elves, and Flower Babies and The Magic Fruit Garden, both published in 1899’ (Oxford DNB). The Magic Fruit Garden was issued by Anglo-German publisher Ernest Nister, best known for his colourful moveable and popup books. Very scarce in both commerce and libraries. In the US, Worldcat lists copies at: Purdue, Princeton, Dartmouth and Universities of Rochester and Connecticut only.

A good and typical illustrated commonplace album with transcribed verses, drawings and watercolours. The selections are very much representative of the contemporary fashion among women for such manuscript collections: poems by Byron, Goldsmith and others, verses of friendship, loss and leave-taking, nature poems, riddles and aphorisms. A nicely self-aware inclusion here is Benjamin Franklin’s humorous ‘Paper a Poem’ relating paper types (gilt paper, copy paper, brown paper, foolscap, touch paper, waste paper and so on) to human analogues. The relatively few poems by women include Ann Radcliffe’s ‘To the Nightingale’ and ‘To Anne’ (unattributed here but by Mary Anne Browne, 1812-1845, entitled by her ‘Written in an Album’). Most of the contents have been entered within a few years of 1828 followed by a scatter of much later entries of the 1870s and 80s towards the end.

The best description of the album genre in the history of reading and writing is by William St Clair in The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (2004, pp. 224-9), a passage could aptly serve as a description of Ann Jordan’s album.

A substantial unpublished manuscript practical treatise on obstetrics and midwifery. 39 headings (most with numerous subheadings) plus several further sections towards the end where spaces have been left for formal headings not completed (for the full list of contents see below). An entirely practical treatise, probably intended as a course of instruction for midwives, it opens with a statement of ‘Les qualités d’une Sage femme’ covering both the physical and temperamental requirements of the calling (’Qualités physiques’ and ‘Qualités morales’). Throughout this carefully prepared and presented text are found numerous references to authors of the published corpus of European works in obstetrics including the works of: [Marie-Louise] Lachapelle [1769-1821]; [Jean-Louis] Baudelocque [1746-1810]; [Franz] Naegele [1778-1851]; Madame Meyer [?] and [Antoine Louis] Dugès [1797-1838] among several others. It thus presents an interesting case study in the dissemination and reception of medical knowledge in a practical context beyond the context of formal printed texts.

Les qualités d’une Sage femme
Accouchement
Bassin en Général
Excavation
Detroit Infèrieur
Articulations du Bassin
La tête du foetus à terme
Appareil de Copulation
Vagin
Appareil de Germination
Apareil de Gestation
Changements que l’Utérus eprouve pendant les divers Mois de la Grossesse
Déplacements de l’utérus
Renversement de l’utérus
Divisions de l’Abdomen
Developpement des annexes du foetus
Membranes propres à l’Oeuf
Placenta
Le Cordon ombilical
Developpement du foetus
Fonction du foetus
Circulation foetale
Changements que la circulation eprouve pendant les divers Mois de la grossesse
Changements que la circulation foetale eprouve pendant le travail de l’Accouchement
Changements que la circulation foetale eprouve après la Naissance
De la Grossesse (with a series of direct and indirect diagnoses)
Grossesse Géméllaire
Grossesse-extra-uterine
Accouchement
Sécrétion du lait
Présentations du Foetus
Positions de la Présentation du Vertex
Présentation de la Face
Présentation du Pelvis
Description du Forceps
Avortement
Hémorrage Produite par Implantation Anomale du Placenta
Invertie Utérine
Eclampsie ou Convulsion

Joseph Rounard is listed at the address in Marseille’s Place d’Orléans from the later 1840s.

First edition of this children’s primer for the alphabet and elementary reading. The alphabets are given in varying types to aid recognition, and then a graduated scheme of reading provides short texts in syllabic form in large type, moving to standard orthography in regular type. The texts include stories and fables by Fénelon, La Fontaine, Benjamin Franklin (’Le Sifflet’ a translation of ‘The Whistle’), Nodier, and Balzac (an early collaborator of Hetzel, who contributed his story ‘Tony Sans-Soin’). The charming vignettes (some later coloured, presumably by a careful child) are by Séguin, Meissonnier, Grandville and others.

Le Livre des Petits Enfants,was one of the very earliest publications by juvenile publishing pioneer Pierre-Jules Hetzel and though not marked as such in this first edition, was to form the first volume of his Nouveau Magasin de Enfants series (which ran to 17 more titles by 1857). It was reprinted several times, but the first edition is rare. Vicaire pp. 227-8. Penelope E. Brown, A Critical History of French Children's Literature, 2011, p. 19. Worldcat lists copies at Columbia and NYPL only outside continental Europe. COPAC/JISC adds a copy at Aberystwyth.

A lovely copy with contemporary ownership inscriptions: ‘Mlle. Justine Debonnaire’. Bouilly’s popular conduct book in the form collection of short stories ran to at least three French editions within a year, and another was published in London in 1813. The 19 stories (completed with a conclusion) include ‘Les Oiseaux de madame Helvétieus’; ‘La Robe feuille-morte de madame Cottin’, ‘Les Tablettes de Florian’, ‘Les Manie des Romans’ (especially interesting and amusing, with a tilt at Ann Radcliffe and the gothic vogue), ‘Jenny la Bouquetière’ and ‘Les Dangers d’un Bon Mot’.

An April 1 satire on Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville, who was accused of appropriating funds for non-naval purposes during his tenure as Lord of the Admiralty. His trial was a sensation and attracted a huge audience in Westminster Hall. In this print, when interrogated by John Bull in naval dress, he replies simply: ‘Indeed Mr Bull - I knaw nae more aboot it - than Johnny Groat o'the Highlands.’ The satire is revealing of the prevailing anti-Scottish sentiment provoked by the case.

Fores’s imprint advertises ‘Folios of Caracatures lent out for the Evening'.

Dundas was the most prominent Scottish politician of his era and instrumental in the progress of the Scottish Enlightenment. He is commemorated by one of the most prominent memorials in Edinburgh, the column and statue in St. Andrew’s Square. His commemoration is contentious — Dundas having effectively delayed the abolition of slavery for several years. BM Satires, 10381.

First editions, limited issues, numbers 127 and 231 of 200 and 400 copies respectively (a further 75 copies of each edition were issued on Japanese vellum and signed by publisher and artists). Separately issued companion volumes, collecting Wilde’s letters to Ross, his sometime-lover, constant companion and literary executor, written from France in the aftermath of his release from Reading Gaol. Ross faithfully guarded Wilde’s personal and literary legacy after his death, pursuing pirated editions and preserving his literary rights for Wilde’s sons. It was he who commissioned Epstein’s sculpture for the tomb at Père Lachaise and his will stipulated that his own ashes should be placed there with Oscar’s.

Ross had prepared a volume of Wilde’s post-prison letters to him before the first war and had drafted an introduction shortly before his own sudden death in 1918. These two small volumes are selections, but represent the earliest attempt at a collection of Wilde letters. They are expurgated by removing the names of Lord Alfred Douglas, Constance Wilde and a few others, but the meanings are always obvious.

‘Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit / Death how certain Death how sur[e] / Sin the wound. And Christ the cure’. ‘Emma. Preest. Her work / Tuts Hill House / July. 20. 1847 Aged /12. Years. Old’.

Emma Preest is possibly the Emma born on the 8th June 1835 at Bream Eaves, Gloucestershire and baptised in the Wesleyan chapel at Monmouth — certainly that would accord with her given age (12) in 1847 when she made this sampler. The identity of Tuts Hill house is not straightforward, there having been two houses so named in the vicinity of Tidenham, Chepstow. We can find no pictorial evidence of either of them as a three-storey, four bay house as in Emma’s depiction, and no Preest family associated with either. But if one accepts the likelihood of Emma being Gloucestershire born, both houses would have been some ten miles from her birthplace, suggesting the possibility she entered service at one of them at the age of 12 (quite possible) and that this may have been an ‘apprentice’ piece. Young girls were taught this kind of sewing not so much as a primer in reading (still less writing) as in household needleork and linen labelling.

The verse is a variation of a popular gravestone epitaph: ‘Life is uncertain, death is sure, Sin the wound, and Christ the cure. If we have correctly identified Emma Preest, she married in 1854, had several children and emigrated with her family after 1870 and died in 1915 at Shawnee, Perry County, Ohio, USA, aged 80.

Number 2 of 15 copies.