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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).

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.

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. Worldcat: Columbia and Bn.

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 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 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.

First edition of this parallel text edition, which is the third edition in English, after Hoby’s translation of 1561 and Samber’s of 1724. For a translator of such a substantial text, very little attention has been paid to the identity of ‘A.P. Castiglione’ and not much is known about him. He appears to have been a political refugee and a language tutor, to judge by the wording of his dedication to the King: ‘Your Majesty’s happy Realm, which has long been an Asylum to the distressed in every Nation, will now become so much their Countrey, that the Peace they enjoy in it, can alone incline them to think it not so. When your gracious Intention to establish Professors of the Modern Languages was made public I embrac’d with Pleasure the first Opportunity for expressing my Gratitude towards a generous People, among whom, as at first I was brought by Conscience, I am likely ever to remain by Inclination.’

He evidently enjoyed the patronage of Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London, who is thanked in ‘To the Reader’ and who appears among the subscribers (taking 12 copies). The fine engraved portrait of Castiglione in his edition is by George Vertue after the portrait in the Louvre by Raphael. The work concludes with a fine woodcut tailpiece with a medallion portrait., perhaps cut especially for this edition.

First edition. To relieve prison overcrowding, Lord Sydney favoured finding an alternative place of transportation, rather than the penitentiaries advocated by the prominent social reformer, Jeremy Bentham. In 1784, he sponsored the Transportation Act. Though New South Wales is not mentioned as a destination, it was favoured by Sydney after consulting the testimonies of both Joseph Banks and the mariner Joseph Matra. Initially ruled out on the grounds of its extreme remoteness, in 1786 the British cabinet came to accept Sydney’s recommendation that convicts be transported there. The Act has come to be regarded as the primary document for the British settlement of Australia.

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 pagination 907-919 here. ESTC N58442 (Lincoln’s Inn and State Library of New South Wales only though copies are under-recorded since they are often catalogued within volumes and sets of the Acts of Parliament.); Ferguson, Bibliography of Australia 3.

A Greek edition of the magical oracles of Zoroaster, which includes commentaries of Pletho and Psellus in Latin, together with a separate collection of metrical oracles, both edited by Johannes Opsopaeus (1556-1596, physician and philologist, professor of medicine at Heidelberg, whose principal literary activity related mainly to the Sibylline Oracles and Hippocrates). The two volumes, though separately bound together here, were also issued as the second and third parts of a three-volume collection, the first being of the Sybylline oracles. Both titles bear the fine woodcut Lutetian ship device of the so-called ‘Compagnie de la Grand-Navire’, which in 1599 comprised the printers Abel l’Angelier, Barthélmy Macé, Ambroise Drouart, Michel II and Laurent and Jean Sonnius (Répertoire d’imprimeurs 1265). Their individual devices can be seen on the ship’s pennants. Adams lists each volume both separately and as part of the three volume collection. Brunet V, 370. Caillet 8135. Ebert 21171. Adams O 208-209.

A French edition, translated from the German original by Francois Jean Philibert Aubert de Vitry. A series of dialogues addressed to young children (a boy and a girl) aged four and five, emphasising all the essential virtues of parenthood. The attractive aquatint plates were probably issued with the original edition and include several delightful family scenes. The first French edition appeared in 1825 and the date of 1837 for this reprint is taken from the Princeton Cotsen catalogue. cf. Barbier, II 1010; Querard VIII 508-10.

An extensive cookery and domestic and medical receipt book once bound as a notebook, now loose but substantially complete with circa 120 complete recipes in several hands. Though mostly undated, two entries later in the collection are recipes copied from magazines of 1815. It is not possible to identify the owner of compiler, Mrs Barber, and the entries include a wide variety of regional and local recipes making it almost impossible to suggest a region of origin — though Dorsteshire and Somersetshire are both referred to.

A Receipt for Blacking; To make a Cake with Custard; To preserve Damsons; To pickle Pork; To make a Cake; To make White sauce for Fowls; Plum Cake; Treacle Beer; Rice Cheesecakes; To lake Muffins; Mrs. Gilks’s receipt to make a Cake; To make a green Ointment; Yellow Pickle; Currant Wine; Apricot Jam; For a Cough; To make a Mead; To make Raisin Wine; To pickle Salmon; A common Rice pudding; To make little Cakes; To make Breakfast Cakes; To make Snail Milk; For a scald or Burn; Shrub; Ratafia; Goldbold’s Vegatable Balsom; To make Nankeen Dye; Friend Day’s Receipt to make Parsnip Wine; Nitrous Fever mixture; Milk of Roses; Fine Sope; Gargle for a Sore Throat; Hiera Piera; A Plaister to be worn for pain restraint; Daffy’s Elixir; Stoughtons Elixir; For the Piles; Bread Pudding; Blanc Mange; Cure for Cancers; Yellow Pickle; To make Macceroons; To make Rattifies; Shrewsbury Cakes; Mint Drops; For a Violent Lax; M. Smith’s way to make Ginger Wine; S. Cash’s way to make Cowslip wine; Directions and outward Applications for all Wounds without Inflamations; Application for Swellings that are likely to break and come to a Wound; For a Cough; Nurse Jones’s Receipt for the Rheumatism; To make Potatoe Cheesecakes; To make Vinegar; To make Raspberry Jam; To make Banbury Cakes; Mr. Bickmore’s receipt for light batter puddings; Currant Wine; Another Way; To Keep Damsons; Chese of Damsons; Receipt for the Jaunders; ED receipt for the ague; Plumb Cake; Cousin Crabbs way to make Ginger Wine; To make a sere cloth plaster; To make Gingerbread; To make a Melbet Pudding; Susanna Barrats way to make Walnut Ketshup; To make Elder Ointment; To make Lime water; A Receipt for the Rheumatic Complaint; Pound Cake; To make Yorkshire tea cakes; For a cough; To make Oat or Hava Cakes; [?] Tutty’s reciept for a Cake; N. Taylor’s reciept for minced pyes; Rev’d Bishops Biscuits; Cousin Townsends receipt for British Madeira; To clean Stoves; Another way to clean Stoves; To make wash Ball; Cheap and Excellent Custards; To make Sprats taste like Anchovies; Black Currant Wine; Soft Cheese; M. Garrards Ginger bread Cakes; Fr. Ransomes Cake; To Pickle Walnuts; The manner of cureing the Bread-bag in Dorsetshire for making Cheese; Somersetshire Frumity; A method of preserving Cream; To prevent milk & Butter from tasting of Turnips; To make a Cake Fr. Moore’s way; To boil Coals in milk for Rheumatism; Preservative from Moths in Books & Clothes; Aromatic Vinegar; [4pp. on the treatment of coughs]; Doctor Badeleys first prescription for [?S or L. Martin] aged 15 supposing the fits were occasioned by indigestion. 16pp. Dell’s prescription for M Matthew’s Shortage of breath; For [illegible] or other weaknesses; November’s magazine,1815 From the practice of J. Want late Surgeon to the North London Despensary 11 North Crescent Bedford Square [followed by a disqusition on the symptoms and treatment of epilepsy and coughs, and the possible significance of variations in weather, prompted by Want’s Monthly Report of Diseases in N.W. London: from November 24 to December 24, 1815, in The Monthly Magazine, No. 277]; For Infectious Fevers Fumigation; Good Family Pills; An excellent Fever mixture; To ease a cough; To Polish Horns; For a weak Stomach; To make Calomel Ointment; A Receipt for the Scurvy; For the Rhumatism; Huxhams Tincture of Bark, 2 separate leaves and 4pp., probably formerly part of (ii). Leaf 1: Duke of Buckinghams Pudding; Duke of Cumberlands Pudding; Red Currant Wine as made in 1818; Potatoe Pudding; Elder Rob. Leaf 2: Monthly Report for October 1816 From August 24 to Sept 24; Eye Water. 4 pp: [3pp. (partial) treatment instructions]; Ginger Beer from the Monthly Magazine.�

Basil Spence and John Hutton worked together as architect and mural painter for the Society of Mural Painters’ RIBA exhibition in 1953. The scheme that they picked to work on was one for the interior of an office building. David Rock designed an interior with a mezzanine and interesting views throughout. On one side of the room was to be a mural with nine full height muses by John Hutton. Hutton, however, never came up with the other six in time for the exhibition, so Rock simply made them up in Hutton’s style. Many years later a book was written about John Hutton where the author mistook the six muses that Rock had created for Hutton’s own work, arguing that the six muses sketch had been mislaid over time! At the opening of the exhibition, however, there was a lot of embarrassment as Hutton had motioned Rock into a group and introduced him to his model Marigold, whom Rock had only met in her dressing gown when he collected Hutton’s sketches. After a few seconds of confusion Rock said “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t recognise you with your clothes on!” Exhibited: John Hutton New Zealand Tour, National Art Gallery, Wellington, et al, 1972, cat no. 2.

Two rare works, probably both London-printed, by the Chevalier D’Eon — the French diplomat recognised as one of the first openly transgender figures in European print. The Lettres appear here in their second edition, identical to (and swiftly following) the first, but with a new preface, while the Dernières Lettres is in its rare first edition (at least one more followed).
Following a successful military career d’Eon served Louis XV in English diplomacy and espionage from 1762, gathering defence intelligence for a projected French invasion. Living lavishly in London he alarmed the French government, who stopped his pension and sought to recall him to France. He became embroiled in a bitter row with his compatriot Claude Louis François Régnier de Guerchy (1715–1767), who he saw as an interloper on his diplomatic patch. ‘From October 1763 the dispute took a spectacular turn as d’Eon published allegations that Guerchy had tried to poison him. In March 1764, he went further still and published a selection of his diplomatic papers, which heaped ridicule on Guerchy and his allies in France’ (the present Lettres discussed by Burrows, A King’s Ransom). The dispute was an embarrassment to the French, not least because d’Eon successfully brought the matter to the English courts and because it drew attention to the chevalier’s increasingly complex personal life. It was in the wake of this affair that the chevalier went into hiding in Byfleet (Surrey), spending a year disguised as a woman and going by the name of Madame Duval. This trans experiment initiated the period in which, D’Eon lived partly as a woman and became a celebrated figure in London society.

The Dernière lettre is a superb piece of propaganda issued on d’Eon’s behalf appearing after the comte de Guerchy’s death in 1767 and reproducing the last letter sent to him by d’Eon recounting the facts of the poisoning case together with extensive translations from English legal records of the law case as it worked its way, very publicly, through the courts.

This copy is from the library of politician John Baker Holroyd, 1^st Baron Sheffield (1735-1821, friend of Edward Gibbon). ESTC lists only the BL and UL copies of the ‘La Haye’ second edition of Lettres (and notes a separate large paper issue in a handful of copies) and the BL, Harvard and Czartoryski Library (Cracow) copies of Dernière Lettre only.

First edition. One of the first French painting manuals, often cited as containing the first engravings of the artist’s palette. The twenty numbered plates are those by Corneille referred to on the title while the thirty unnumbered plates are the etchings by Sébastien Leclerc, with their own title-page directly after the text: Figures d’academie pour aprendre; désiner, gravées par Sebastien LeClerc (A Paris Chez N. Langlois, rue St. Jacques; la Victoire).
Neither set of plates was invariably included and the latter plates are preceded by Jombert’s 1751 title-page, as in several other copies, suggesting Les premiers Élemens de la peinture pratique was reissued in the eighteenth century, using original copies/sheets and adding a further suite of plates.
Cicognara, 314: ‘Libretto piuttosto raro e succinto che ha qualche merito per la succosa con cui è scritto: ma si estende presso ché esclusivamente sui preparativi meccanici dell’arte della pittura e le tavole sono inserte fra il testo dell’opera.’

A good copy of this classic, if gruesome, children’s title. Struwwelpeter (’Shock-headed Peter’) was first published in 1845 as Lustige Geschichten und drollige Bilder – with its name changed to the familiar Struwwelpeter in the edition of 1858. It was thereafter reprinted in hundreds of editions worldwide before 1900. The 1876 edition added a special jubilee leaf which was reprinted in later editions, as here. Though undated, this 248th edition was printed c. 1895.