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This notorious caricature was issued as part of the segregation era ‘Darktown Comic’ series. A black woman wearing a tattered brown dress and worn shoes, with an apron decorated in the stars and stripes, and a tall bonnet with a wide brim and white frill, standing on a plinth in the manner of the Statue of Liberty though looking far from serene, but rather clamouring; she holds a flaming torch and a book labelled ‘New York Port Charges’; at her feet is a cockerel crowing; she has her back to the city, shown behind her across the water, with a distant bridge.

The partnership of Nathaniel Currier (1813-1888) and James Merritt Ives (1824-1895) grew into one of the largest and most prolific printing companies of all time, at one point responsible for 95% of all lithographs in circulation in America. Beginning as a lithographer, Currier recognized the market for topical prints and news and became successful as an independent lithographer and later print publisher, before taking on his bookkeeper and accountant Ives as a partner. With hand-operated presses on one floor, artists, stone grinders and lithographers on the floor above and a team of others colouring the finished lithographs by hand on the floor above that, the firm extended well beyond its New York offices, selling retail and wholesale, from street-carts and through booksellers, nationally and internationally, including by mail-order. They flourished on their populist approach, promoting themselves as ‘The Grand Central Depot for Cheap and Popular Prints’, and ‘the best, cheapest, and most popular firm in a democratic country’, providing ‘colored engravings for the people’ and issuing over 7000 prints in countless copies. According to Byran Le Beau, after initially depicting the horrors of slavery in the 1840s, the company began instead to focus on African Americans as the cause of divisive politics and civil war, until by the end of the century, they were portraying them as incapable of living in anything but a condition of servitude. If in this they were, as described by a prominent collector of Currier & Ives material, Harry T. Peters, ‘businessmen and craftsmen … but primarily mirrors of the national taste, weather vanes of popular opinion, reflectors of American attitudes’, they were in equal measure responsible for endorsing and establishing the distorted views they both targeted and marketed so well (cf. Bryan F. Le Beau, African Americans in Currier and Ives’s America: The Darktown Series, in Journal of American & Comparative Cultures).

First edition in English of one of the most influential technical painting manuals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Traité de mignature (also École de la mignature), 1673. First printed by Christophe Ballard in 1673, the publisher’s initials perhaps giving rise to unproven attribution to one ‘Claude Boutet’, it appeared in over 30 editions in a variety of European languages over the next 200 years, often with additions and alterations by anonymous authors.

The English edition is dedicated to John Montagu, second duke of Montagu (1690–1749) by its anonymous translator. After an exposition of the available colours and materials, the chapters consider in turn: Draperies; Of Carnations [flesh], or the Naked Parts of Painting; Landskips and Flowers; followed by a short treatise on the advantages of miniature painting over other techniques. The section devoted to flowers is extensive, with detailed instructions on the painting of roses, tulips, anemones (’wind-flower’), carnations, lilies, hyacinths, peonies, crocuses, irises, jasmine, tuberoses, hellebores, daffodils, passion-flowers, pinks, pomegranate, indian bean flower and crown imperial, among others. ESTC: BL, Cambridge, Glasgow, Huntington and Clark Library only. OCLC adds Yale and National Art Library (Victoria and Albert Museum).

British and German aircraft drawn by an accomplished amateur during the first year of the German occupation of France. The aircraft include a Vickers Wellington, Miles Magister, Westland Lysander, Short Sunderland seaplane, Fairey Battle, Messerschmidt 109 and Heinkel He. 112.

First edition. Green traded in Wells Street (off Oxford Street) as a bookseller, printseller and publisher of prints c. 1801-18, also trading as a boot dealer (according to the BBTI). The adverts list Green’s publication, The Complete Aquatinter, as well as several prints, etching and engraving tools as well as ‘Drawing taught at Home and Abroad’.

First edition under this title. A very interesting global catalogue of marriage and courtship customs among Christians, Jews, Muslims and other religions. Not actually a translation from an English work as the title pretends, but a fairly direct copy of Louis de Gaya’s Cérémonies nuptiales de toutes les nations (1680), to which is added the polygamistic tale of M. Harry. Hurtaut was also responsible for the 1751 title L’Art de Péter (’The Art of Farting’). Gay I, 742.

A charming and accomplished series of diminutive watercolours of views in Ireland, including rugged landscapes, seascapes, woodland and buildings. Most are captioned and denote locations in Wicklow and Kerry. The owner has added initials ‘F.P.C. and an address in Hackney to the upper cover, and another inscription ‘Miss Collis’ gives an address in Harlesden.

A handsome Romantic reinterpretation of Vignola’s classic Renaissance manual of perspective, Due regole della prospettiva pratica (1582, with many later editions). Elements of Vignola’s diagrams are adapted for the oblong format of the book and often updated with figures and buildings in contemporary style. Bossi, about who we have been able to discover almost nothing beyond this manuscript, also adds a fine sequence of 4 coloured illustrations depicting furniture designs in the French Empire style by Percier and 17 superb monochrome views and interiors, 13 of which are in a sequence with their own decorative title-page ‘Aggiunta di alcune prospettive ricavae da classici autori.’�

First separate edition of the extract from the Mémoires de la Société royale et central d’agriculture. A report on the newly-invented English system of cambered road building pioneered by John Loudon McAdam. It includes a short description of new road-building and paving in London (Saint James, Regent Street and Guildhall). Rare: Worldcat lists the Michigan copy only outside France. No UK copies located by Jisc/Library Hub (formerly COPAC). Not in Kress or Goldmsiths’.

This portrait is a naive interpretation of the classic image of Ramon Llull (c. 1232- c. 1315), Catalan mystic and mathematician. It is derived from the engraved portrait which first appeared in the seventeenth century Bibliotheca Chalcographia published by Jacques Boissard and Theodor de Bry in 1664.

First edition of a profusely illustrated Jesuit life of Christ, whose plates were engraved from the numerous devotional pictures by Flemish masters collected by the Jesuit father Jérome Natalis.

First edition in French of Blasche’s Der Papparbeiter, oder, Anleitung in Pappe zu arbeite (1811). The 8 large folding plates depict a large array of miniature folded paper pieces: geometrical shapes, furniture and buildings. One of them is devoted to garden furniture in the oriental style, including a Chinese bridge.

Contemporary caricature portraits of the great American millionaires Carnegie, Pierpont-Morgan, Gordon-Bennett, Harjes, Frick and Depew. The drawing was probably intended for reduction and publication in an (unidentified) journal. Rouveyre (1879-1962) was immensely prolific as a caricaturist and maintained friendships and correspondence with important figures such as Apollinaire and Matisse (having met the latter as joint students of the symbolist painter Gustave Moreau).

George Woodward, affectionately dubbed ‘Mustard George’ by his contemporaries, was one of the pioneers of English caricature. Like his drinking-partner Thomas Rowlandson, Woodward absorbed high and low culture omnivorously and paid keen attention to contemporary politics.

A Political Fair is ‘a fantastic survey of the international situation’ in 1807 and is considered one of Woodward’s finest images, the print catalogue of the British Museum devoting two full pages to its complex allegories. At the heart of the fair is a large booth (‘The Best-Booth in the Fair’) representing Great Britain holding aloft on its platform images of Britannia, John Bull, together with an Irishman, Scotsman and Welsh harpist gathered convivially around a punchbowl, while a waiter sweeps into the chamber below with a vast joint of roast beef on his platter. All this was typical of Woodward’s patriotism and was intended to portray the essential unity of the nation amidst the host of clamouring figures in the neighbouring booths representing the other nations. Napoleon, in tricorn and feathers, rebuffs a disgruntled Dutchman complaining about his King with the words ‘I never change Mynheer after the goods are taken out of the Shop’. High up on the right, the American booth displays a placard advertising ‘Much ado about Nothing with the Deserter’, a reference to the friction between Britain and the United States over recent defections from British to American ships and the ban on armed British ships in American ports. The Danish booth on the left advertises ‘The English Fleet and The Devil to Pay’ in reference to the hideous bombardment of Copenhagen by the British fleet in September that year.

Musical and theatrical references abound, with many of the placards punning on the titles of plays and musical performances then showing in London: Much ado about Nothing, All’s well that ends well (Shakespeare), The Padlock (Bickerstaffe), The Deserter (Dibdin), The Double Dealer (on the Russian booth, by Congreve) and The English Fleet (Dibdin again). BM Satires, 10763

Number 10 of 250 copies. Shakespeare’s metaphysical poem on the theme of idealised and mystical love was first published in the Supplement to Robert Chester’s Love’s Martyr (1601). In it, the phoenix and the turtle dove are joined in eternal love and burn themselves alive.

A leading figure in the Nouvelle École de Paris, Léon Gischia continued to produce and exhibit avant-garde work throughout the German occupation, despite repeated denunciation for degeneracy. He also produced designs for the theatre, notably for the production in French of Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral at the théâtre du Vieux Colombier in 1945. Bland, History of Book Illustration, 321.

A collection of finely-executed plates illustrating the vogue for neo-Classical dress, with figures and groups placed within appropriate drawing-room and dinner-table settings. Moses was a sought-after engraver who worked for James Barrie, William Opie and Benjamin West, among others. His lightly-draped figures rendered with a sparse line have clear echoes of Flaxman. The collection was also issued under the imprint of at least two other London publishers (M’Lean and Miller).

First edition of these edited extracts from the Florentine chronicler Villani, with lives of Boccaccio, Bardi, Giotto, Paulus Geometrus (the mathematician and tutor to Boccaccio) and Cavalcanti, among others. There are several accounts of Italian medical practitioners, including Taddeo, Torrigiano and Dino and Tommaso del Garbo. The Villani family were the leading contemporary chroniclers of fourteenth-century Florence and Filippo was responsible for extending the chronicles of his father and uncle, adding famous portraits of his contemporaries. Towards the end of his life he was appointed public reader of the Divine Comedy and he died in 1404. His chronicle remained in manuscript before being published by the Brescian historian Mazzuchelli in 1747 in this version which was several times reprinted.

First edition. Joseph Mayer, the Liverpool goldsmith, became a major civic figure in Victorian Britain, mainly for his numerous philanthropic loans and gifts to museums from his enormous personal collections of early decorative arts. His gifts remain a major component of the Liverpool museum collections.

Revised and enlarged second edition, limited to 1000 copies.

First and only edition of this virulent sectarian attack on the antinomian artist/engraver Garnet Terry (‘Onesimus’) by a dissenting ‘Minister of the Gospel at Nethaneel chapel, Eden Street, Tottenham Court Road’. The ‘minister of darkness’, Terry, and his ‘religious and political principles’, promulgated from ‘his haunt in Clare Court, Drury Lane’ are roundly dismissed in seven letters. M’Culla refers repeatedly to a book by Onesimus put into his hands by a bookseller, which we have been unable to identify from library catalogues: Terry’s earlier publications appear to have been on the subject of engraving or were simply short pamphlets. The work referred to by M’Culla ran to over 200 pages, if we can trust his references.

The imprint and final advert provide a useful insight into the dissemination of non-conformist writings. COPAC lists only the British Library copy; not found in OCLC.