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In 1827 members of the Osages Tribe from the Ohio River Valley in Arkansas and Missouri, travelled to Paris with Louisiana resident David DeLaunay. They were initially lionised by Paris society before being abandoned by their host and forced to fend for themselves. This celebrated lithograph shows Kihegashugah or Little Chief (age 28), Minckchatahooh or Little Soldier (age 22), and Grétomih (age 18 and cousin to Kihegashugah’s wife). It was issued as part of Delpech and Boilly’s Grimaces series (with three plates depicting the Osages) but was also issued separately, as here, without the captions found in the Grimaces version.

A rare French jigsaw set in three parts — a wonderful and complete alphabet illustrated with trades and crafts (male and female) including the: an armourer, laundrywoman, gilder, epicier, florist, glovemaker, herbalist, printer, gardener, ‘kiosque’ vendor, milkwoman, blacksmith, fancy goods seller (’nouveautés’), goldsmith, pavier, ironmonger, restaurateur, sculptor, dyer, factoryworker, tailor, wood engraver (’xylographes’ —a good solution for the letter ‘X’) and zincworker.

The very rare catalogue for the first exhibition of industrial products, held in Paris in 1798, the forerunner of the great universal exhibitions of the following centuries.
Organised by the Minister of the Interior, François de Neufchâteau, with a view to ‘offering a panorama of products from the different branches of industry in order to encourage emulation’ this was the first great exhibition held in France. Its origins went back to the previous year and the initiative of the Marquis d’Aveze, who visited the factories of Sèvres, Gobelins and Savonnerie and was appalled both at the starving condition of the workers and at the superabundance of exquisite luxury goods with insufficient commercial outlet. With Neufchâteau, he arranged for an exhibition to be held at the Chateau de St Cloud but on the very day selected for the opening (18th Fructidor 1797) the Directory sent out its decree for the expulsion of the nobility — the Chateau de St Cloud was occupied by a company of dragoons and the Marquis expelled. The exhibition eventually took place the following year at the Chateau d’Orsay and on the Champ-de-Mars (on the spot where the spoils of the Italian campaign had been exhibited six weeks previously) and in a series of sixty arcades designed by David in fashionable Grecian style. Sixteen departments and 110 exhibitors were represented and as a note at the beginning of the catalogue explains, the number would have been even greater but for the speed with which the exhibition was organised, which made it impossible to get word to more distant departments of the country in time. It was a great success and the decision was taken to hold it annually.
The pamphlet sets out the list of exhibitors and is followed by the statement of the Jury given on the 5th Vendemiare, a list of the twelve firms singled out for particular distinction by the jury, and a further list of another twelve firms meriting an ‘honourable mention’. The jury consisted of Vien, Gallois, Darcet, Chaptal, Mollard, Moitte, Gilet-Laumont, Duquesnoy, Ferd and Berthoud. It sets out its criteria clearly: the key merit of any work is the invention and its principle appeal in public terms is its utility. In the context of ongoing hostility with Britain, it is interesting to see that the jury confesses a preference for those products which rival or outshine their British counterparts. A couple of firms which did not choose to exhibit are nonetheless singled out for mention in the address: Boyer Fonfrede, a textile merchant, Didot jeune, the publisher, and Delaître, a cotton weaver. The prize winners included firms of international repute, such as Breguet, the clock maker, Lenoir, inventor and maker of mathematical instruments, and Conté, an engineer who first applied machine-ruling to engraving. Having made known its decision to hold the exhibition on an annual basis in future, the address concludes with resounding praise for the new face of France, delivered by the Revolution from subservience to its neighbours and slavery to ‘routine’, the enemy of all true art. Rare: no printed copy listed in the holdings of the Bibliothèque nationale (which has a manuscript transcription) and only 3 copies known in libraries in France. Worldcat lists copies at Yale, Northwestern, Oregon and the British Library. Sandoz and Guiffrey, Arts appliqués et industries d’art aux expositions, 1912, pp. 1-5; Douyere-Demeulenaere, Expositions publiques des produits de l’industrie francaise, Répertoire méthodique, 2008.

The earliest portrait of Leopold Bloom. Mariette Lydis contributed one illustration to the first issue of “900”, placed with the fragment of Ulysses in the French translation by Auguste Morel. The image, captioned ‘Illustration’ is dated 1925 at the foot. No earlier illustration of Bloom is known (nor indeed any earlier illustration of Ulysses) and the standard idea of him is drawn partly from Joyce’s own inept sketch of him made in Paris in 1926. The image is clearly identifiable as a Leopold Bloom-like figure, yet is perhaps not a direct illustration (what are we to make of the Ostende tourist poster in the background, for example?) but no-one appears to have noted or commented on this remarkable image by an important female artist of the 1920s. While Slocum & Cahoon record the appearance of the text, the image is passed over in silence.

Joyce was nominally a joint editor of the radical literary review “900”, with Massimo Bontempelli. Mariette Lydis was Bontempelli’s lover at this period (her letters to him are preserved at the Getty Institute) and probably also know Joyce. She sketched his portrait the following year in Paris.

The Ulysses excerpt translated by Morel is episode 4, ‘Calypso’, introducing Leopold Bloom with his morning visit to the butcher’s shop for a kidney for Molly’s breakfast. James Joyce is listed among the journal’s editors on the half-title verso (along with Bontempelli, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Jerog Kaiser and Pierre Mac Orlan). Among the adverts at the end of the volume is a full-page for the forthcoming German edition of Ulysses by Rheinverlag of Zurich (the book appeared in the autumn of 1927). Another advert is for the journal Critica Fascista (a ’Fortnightly Fascist Review’). Slocum & Cahoon, A Bibliography of James Joyce (953), D25 (p. 113).

A contemporary or early manuscript copy of the ‘The Votes and other Proceeedings of the honourable House of Commons’ for the first year of the reign of William and Mary, 1688/9, recording the dramatic political background to the Glorious Revolution and with a complete copy of the Declaration of Rights (commonly called the ‘Bill of Rights’) and the more comprehensive ‘Heads of Grievances’ from which it was distilled. Along with Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights is one of the landmarks in the development of constitutional law of England (and by extension, America) setting out basic civil rights which would shape the structure of government into our own era. It set firm limits on the powers of the crown while confirming the place of parliament in legislation and the right to free speech within it. It also guaranteed the right to bear arms, but limiting it to Protestant subjects in defence against the perceived Catholic tyranny of the deposed James II. The Bill of Rights directly reflected the philosophy of John Locke and stands as one of the landmark documents in the development of civil liberties in the United Kingdom and a model for later, more general, statements of rights including the United States Bill of Rights, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights.

It is included here, with much other parliamentary business, in a yearly manuscript volume of ‘The Votes of the House of Commons’. A distinct class of the record, the ’Votes’ were kept by a clerk of the House and recorded business transacted on each day's sittings, including the bills read, orders and resolutions passed, divisions, licences, and the like. Like the better known manuscript ‘Journals’ of the House of Commons the ‘Votes’ are primarily concerned with deeds, not words, and do not typically record the text of speeches or the acts themselves, though certain important determinations such as the Declaration of Rights are given in full. Copies of the Clerk’s originals could be made for members of parliament and there was a limited circulation of the texts in folio volumes such as this one, but they were not published in print until much later.

The fine calligraphic title here originally read ‘1680’, and error corrected, with the final ‘0’ deleted and substituted with an ‘8’. The front free endpaper is inscribed with a note to the binder: ‘Titled Votes 1688 & Marbled on the Leaves’. Included is a note from 1948 from the Commons Librarian to a former owner. While it is impossible to be certain of the date of this manuscript version, both the hand and the binding would place it within a decade or so of 1688. Frankle, Robert J. ‘The Formulation of the Declaration of Rights’. The Historical Journal, vol. 17, no. 2, 1974, pp. 265–279. cf. D. Menhennet, The Journal of the House of Commons: A Bibliographical and Historical Guide, 1971; M.F. Bond, Guide to the Records of Parliament (1971).

First edition of this very scarce collection of plates by a remarkable female engraver. Issued separately in 1814 and later as a suite to an 1827 edition of the illustrations of Flaxman. The 1814 issue was accompanied by a title page, but this set from the library of an early admirer of her work, Prosper de Barante, has been bound without a title.

Very little is known of this remarkable female engraver working in the austere neo-classical style of Flaxman, very much in tune with the aesthetics of the the Empire style in France. Giacomelli was also an accomplished singer. According to Fonds Français après 1800 (IX, p. 74) Giacomelli ‘a gravé au trait sous l’influence de David et avec l’amitié de Denon’. A lithograph portrait of her by Denon survives. The Journal des arts, des sciences, et de littérature reviewed her collection of plates for Milton’s Paradise Lost in 1813:

‘...les amateurs conviendront sans peine que la collection des douze figures de Mme Giacomelli est une des productions les plus agréables que la gravure nous ait offertes depuis long-temps. Nous vivons dans un siècle où les femmes ont conquis, dans la littérature, le rang le plus distingué: il suffit de jeter les yeux sur cet ouvrage, pour s’apercevoir que le domaine des arts ne leur est pas non plus étranger. Déjà le dessin et la gravure ont mérité à Mme Giacomelli d’honorable suffrages; son talent comme cantatrice avait avantageusement brillé dans plusieurs concerts...’ (vol. 15, p. 62).

First edition (despite the mention fictive ‘deuxième édition’ on the title-page). A pioneering gay narrative and one of the first novels written about Oscar Wilde after his conviction. Messes noires is the story of Lord Lyllian, a tragic character born in Scotland with a striking overt resemblance to Wilde, addicted to adolescent boys and to opium. It was written on the Island of Capri where Fersen had fled following his arrest in France (for indecent assault and exciting minors to debauchery in the course of a series of soirées dubbed Messes noires). Fersen had formerly associated with a coterie of Paris decadents including Jean Lorrain, Robert de Montesquiou and Karl-Joris Huysmans, but his 1903 arrest caused a scandal in the press, who were quick to dub him ‘un nouvel Oscar Wilde’, and he was ostracised by almost all his former literary friends. The cover and title-page of the novel bear the Wildean epigram ‘L’amour a pour moi deux ennemis: / les préjugés et ma concierge’.

A good prize binding, from George Green’s School, Docklands, East London, founded in 1828 by George Green, a shipbuilder and shipwright.

Second edition (The first edition had appeared the previous year, with the same plates, as three consecutive volumes in Bentley’s Miscellany). ‘Praised for its vivid writing, especially its depiction of a storm on the Thames and its account of Jack Sheppard's escape from Newgate prison, the novel became so popular that by the end of 1839 nine different theatrical versions of it had appeared on the London stage. One of these versions introduced the hit song of the season (’Nix my Dolly, Pals’), based on a ‘flash song’ of criminal slang that Ainsworth had written for Rookwood. But Jack Sheppard also provoked criticism. John Forster attacked it in The Examiner for glorifying criminals, William Makepeace Thackeray did the same in his novel Catherine, and there were even suggestions that the notorious murder committed by Courvoisier in 1840 had been inspired by a reading of Ainsworth's novel’ (ODNB).

Sixteenth edition (the first was November 1924). Avery presentable copy.

One of the last French royal Calendriers issued in the last years of the restored Bourbon monarchy (before the July Revolution of 1830). In addition to the calendar it contains details of all the French royal households and of monarchies all over the world as well as French military commanders.

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.’

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

A substantial unpublished manuscript treatise on obstetrics and midwifery. There are 39 headings (most with numerous subheadings) plus several further sections towards the end where spaces have been left for formal headings not completed (full list of contents below). An entirely practical treatise, probably intended as a course of instruction for midwives, the manuscript 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, supplier of the blank ruled book in the which the manuscript is written is listed at the address in Marseille’s Place d’Orléans from the later 1840s.