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First published in 1778, this important Lakeland guide had reached no less than 11 editions by 1821. Its picturesque vision was hugely influential and can be credited, at least in part, with establishing the Romantics’ interest in the Lakes. ‘Drawing freely on the work of previous writers, notably Thomas Gray, Thomas Pennant, and John Brown, and very much reflecting the contemporary interest in what West himself calls ‘landscape studies’, the Guide is nevertheless a work of considerable individuality, displaying a real sensitivity to the visual qualities of the district. The recommended 'stations' for viewing the landscape were a significant innovation. The author's antiquarian passion and his curiosity about industrial activities are clearly evident. The Guide undoubtedly did much to popularize the district (Oxford DNB).

A diminutive juvenile edition, one of three by Wenman (1781, 1783, 1787, all rare). First published in 1762, The Shipwreck proved extremely popular and was thereafter expanded and republished several times. Falconer, himself a seaman, had died at sea in 1769. ESTC: BL, Senate House and Southwestern University.

First published anonymously in May 1744, Moore’s Fables for the Female Sex had at least seventeen other editions in the eighteenth century, four of which were American; it was translated into French in 1764 and German in 1772. Three of the fables are by Henry Brooke. Hayman’s illustrations incorporate numerous elements from Francis Barlow’s sequence of the previous century; his original drawings of 1744 are preserved in the Rothschild collections at Waddesdon. Foxon, M428.

The Supernatural Philosopher is a reissue of The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Duncan Campbell (1720) with the addition of ‘Verses to Mr. Campbell. On the History of his Life and Adventures’ and ‘A remarkable passage of an apparition. 1665’.
The author evidently lodged for a while in the same London house as the Scots-born soothsayer Duncan Campbell (d. 1730), who was a well-known figure in the city. Deaf and mute, he was probably educated at Glasgow using the finger system devised by John Wallis in the seventeenth century. The History of the Life was persistently attributed until relatively recently to Defoe even though it was reissued here under Bond’s name.

The ‘Genii of Caricature’ haul in a net full of subjects (portraits, bon mots, manners, oddities, jokes etc) to Tegg’s Apollo Library, which advertises ‘The Largest Assortment of Caricatures in the World’, while the proprietor takes a pot shot at folly flying overhead. The caption is from Pope: ‘Eye Natures walks, shoot Folly as it flies, and catch the manners living as they rise’ (Essay on Man). The Apollo Library was at 111 Cheapside, at the corner of Honey Lane opposite St Mary-Le-Bow church. A famous caricature print, the tailpiece from The Caricature Magazine, vol. 3, published by Thomas Tegg, London, 1808–09, and the separate plate reissued several times to c. 1821.

A satire on Charles James Fox and William Pitt the Younger and on the prolonged negotiations for a coalition (’junction’) between their parties. BM Satires 10370; Grego, Rowlandson the caricaturist, 49.

A unusual collection of examples of typography and printing techniques, which would be of use in the classroom as non-digital but portable samples of letterpress and intaglio printing, woodcut, engraving, etching, lithography, wood engraving and their various combinations. All have been cut from (hopefully) defective original sources and include full pages (including numerous title-pages) and cut examples of initials (woodcut, metalcut, wood engraved, etc) and ornaments (intaglio and letterpress). Some of the sheets bear pencil notes as to approximate date and city, most being French, with some English and German. A good proportion of the samples are early, with a concentration in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but with significant sixteenth century examples, including decorative title-pages and initials.

First separate edition of Seguin’s tables of squares and cubes designed for architects and for other practical purposes. The tables were originally issued as an appendix to his Manuel d’architecture (1786) Worldcat: Cornell and Brigham Young only.

First separate edition, also issued simultaneously as a suite to the author’s Question de longitude sur mer (1833), but here issued alone with its own title-page and errata leaf forming a wrapper. The final 4 leaves are adverts for the author’s controversial mechanical planispheres, one of which is illustrated in the very large folding plate.

Demonville had been a printer (and the son of a printer to the Académie française) but diversified as a maker of globes scientific instruments after losing his licence to print in Paris. In the year of publication, he acquired notoriety as an astronomical crank who denied the astronomy of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Halley and Herschel. His planispehere demonstrates his alternative system: the earth, the sun and the moon are the only astronomical bodies; the earth does not rotate (it merely nods a little over the course of a year); the moon is 250 leagues from the earth and the sun, just 1500; the stars are affixed to the crystalline sphere; and the planets have no corporeal existence. Demonville hawked his system (with both books and his instruments) around Paris and London, even obtaining an audience with William III, who asked the Royal Society for their opinion. With his longitude pamphlets he sought to obtain prizes from the Societies of Paris and London but ideas were roundly dismissed, and Demonville pilloried in the press. Both issues rare.

First separate edition, presentation copy, reprinted from the Annali degli Medicina, January/Febraury 1833. The second cholera pandemic of the 1830s hit France harder than most other European countries. Spreading from the Far East via Russia, it appeared in Western Europe in 1831. In Paris it is estimated that 20,000 died (from a population of 650,000) with about 100,000 deaths across France. Caffarelli, a Piedmontese corresponding member of the Paris Société des Sciences Physiques, Chimiques et Arts industriels here considers the symptoms and progress of the disease, its treatment (both internal an external) according to contemporary methods. National Library of Medicine only in Worldcat. No copies located in French or British libraries.

First edition of an influential pamphlet by a well-known French ceramicist, considering contemporary pottery from a hygenic point of view, and recommending his own newly-developed ‘hygiocerames’. Surveying the existing methods of production and glazing, he identifies numerous health risks in underfired pottery and in glazes using metal oxides. Wedgwood’s Etrurian pottery and his hugely-successful white Queen’s Ware come in for particular censure, though its popularity is conceded. The pamphlet was part of major enquiry into ceramic production in France initiated by the Sèvres factories.

First edition of this rare Italian contribution to the aeronautical excitements of 1784, addressed to the Paris Académie royale. Bruno proposed an elegant and elaborate gondola with oars and sails in an early attempt to solve the problem of steering a dirigible balloon (Lynn, The Sublime Invention: Ballooning in Europe, 1783-1820, p. 55). The work also included a proposal for a personal flotation device (for navigating water). It was reviewed at some length in the Rome Memorie per le belle arte in 1788. Worldcat: LC, US Airforce Academy, Hagley Museum and Harvard in US. There is a copy in the BL.

First edition, an account of advanced English pottery techniques, mainly derived from those of Wedgwood. Instructions for decoration include both bas relief and transfer printing techniques, both relatively new methods in France. The plates depict English potter’s wheels and a kiln. Edme Jean Baptiste Bouillon-Lagrange contributed chemical data.

An unpublished French translation of Wheaton’s influential History of the Northmen (1831) by Emma Chuppin de Germigny (1809?-1852). History of the Northmen is notable as the first book in English to claim that America had been discovered by the Norse before the voyage of Columbus.

The translator Emma Chuppin de Germigny was the daughter of a noble emigré settled in Normandy after the Revolution. A long biographical entry in the Mémoires of the Caen Académie recounts her life: her family’s reduced circumstances necessitated her work as a schoolmistress in Caen, during which time she produced a series of scholarly works (including the Wheaton translation). She published a history of music in Normandy from the ninth century to her own day (1836) and an account of the Bayeux Tapestry (1846). Her translation of Wheaton’s work was not published, though the form of this manuscript, and Emma’s circumstances, strongly suggests it was intended to be. It is almost certainly in her autograph, with occasional corrections. In the event, a French edition by Paul Guillot, with numerous additional apparatus, appeared at Paris in 1844.

Wheaton, a native of Providence, Rhode Island and an alumnus of Brown University was prominent as a lawyer, diplomat and antiquarian. His research into Scandinavian history began with his appointment to Denmark as chargé d’affaires in 1827.

First edition. The collection is mostly juvenile and is introduced with the poem ‘Adieu to Harrow’. The delightful plates are by Isaac Cruikshank, father of George. Jackson, p. 204.

First edition, the first published work of Marga Gil Roësset (b. 1908) then aged twelve. Marga’s talent was astonishingly precocious, and her compositions for this fairy tale by her sister, Consuelo, combine vestiges of a distinctive Spanish art nouveau with a troubling, dreamlike quality entirely her own. Born into a cultivated and talented family, she became dangerously ill as a child, manifestly influencing some of these extraordinary illustrations. She published further illustrations before becoming a sculptor and exhibiting at the Esposizione Nazionale di Belle Arti a Madrid in 1932 as one of the most promising artists of her generation. She had, however, become infatuated with the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez (who was married) and committed suicide in 1932, having destroyed most of her work and presented her manuscript diary to Jiménez on the day of her death (it has recently been published). Worldcat: Princeton and Spanish Ministry of Education only.

Original engraved copper plate for a frontispiece to the Confessions, showing Rousseau himself as an allegory of the ‘natural man’ and the naked female figure of truth, engraved for volume 12 of the monumental 18 volume large quarto Didot edition of the collected works (1793-1800). An excellent example of an eighteenth-century large format copper plate. Cohen-de Ricci 912; Ray, 95.

First edition of Crebillon’s five-act adaptation from Sophocles, this copy annotated with contemporary deletions, corrections and other markings, presumably for performance. There are markings on some 40 pages, ranging from simple crosses or other marks to deletions of short passages and occasional comments: ‘on ne pas cela’ or ‘jusque icy’, all suggesting an actor’s or prompt copy.

Electre was one of Crébillon père’s great early successes, performed for the first time at the Comédie-Française on 14 December 1708, subsequently causing a quarrel with Voltaire, who wrote his own version and disparaged Crebillon’s. In spite of Crebillon’s early celebrity, he famously retreated to a garret around 1711, in a long episode of misanthropy accompanied by his dogs, cats and pet crows before his rehabilitation under the patronage of Madame de Pompadour and the Académie Française. Cioranescu I, 21658. Worldcat: Cambridge, Harvard and Thomas Fisher Library (Toronto) only outside France.

A movie-enthusiast’s notebooks - filled with striking coloured portraits of male characters in films popular in the Netherlands, including Dutch-language versions of The Thirteenth Chair (1929 film); Madame Sans-gêne (1925 film); Maria Stuart (1927); The Trial of Mary Dugan (1931); Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, Shaw’s How He Lied to Her Husband; Jonson’s Volpone; Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, King Lear and Macbeth. The anonymous albums are numbered in pencil, suggesting they were part of a larger group.

First edition, inscribed: ‘À Miss Natalie Clifford Barney, imperturbable, André Rouveyre’. Rouveyre was a prolific newspaper caricaturist, moving in some of the most interesting circles of Paris society and developing his distinct and pioneering style, poised between minimalism and expressionism.