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First edition of the first French book on the diabolo or devil sticks, and thus probably the first European book on the subject. The diabolo craze swept Paris in 1812, all the illustrations here are of young men and women at play with this juggling toy. Besides the first two chansons, on a diabolo theme the texts here are typical of other contemporary almanacs, and the last 14 pages contain an almanac for 1813. Derived from an ancient Chinese toy it was the French who first embraced it as a fashionable activity in the early nineteenth century.

First edition, regular copy on Lafuma (after 25 on Japon and 50 on Hollande, total edition 1330). A brilliant literary jeu d’esprit presenting contemporary French authors as shopkeepers: François Mauriac presides over a butcher’s, La Chair et la sang, Macorlan, a fishmonger’s, Les Poissons morts, Max Jacob, a photographer’s studio, Le Cabinet noir, Colette sells travel goods from La Vagabonde, Carco presides over a brothel, Rien q’une Femme, Gide sells gorceries at Nourritures terrestres, while Jean Cocteau presents a crazy sideshow booth, La Noce massacrée.

First edition, scarce. Taxidermy was at the heart of most natural history cabinets and museums before the modern era, but there are relatively few treatises devoted to this art. Manesse’s was one of only a handful of treatises available to French naturalists dealing with the vast influx of animals and birds sent to Paris for study from all over the world. He proposed a type of tanning of the skins of carcasses to facilitate their long-term preservation.

A very rare publisher’s advert for children’s books, issued on behalf of Amable Rigaud (a pseudonym of children’s author and publisher Charles de Ribelle), publisher at 50 rue Sainte Anne, Paris. Rigaud was prolific from around 1859 to 1880 and this fine lithograph appears to date from the early part of this period. It lists 15 different title all published around 1859-61 including Histoire des siècles. Des Découvertes et inventions, Livre des jeunes personnes vertueuses, Le grand Alphabet pittoresque de la jeunesse, Le Monde et se merveilles and Histoire des animaux célèbres. Born in 1810 Ribelle had also founded a juvenile magazine Journal des enfants.

Sole edition, one of 50 copies on chine. An illustrated collection of epithets on love and the relationships between men and women, a witty reflection of the sexual politics of fin-de-siècle Paris. The conceit of the title, and the charming accompanying vignette, involves communication (or perhaps miscommunication) via headphones and a phonographic machine operated by Cupid. It is a nice example of the contemporary fascination with the potential of electronic communications, with echoes of the science-fiction fantasy La Fin des livres by Albert Robida published in the same year, in which a new world of literature was a network of wires and headphones and of the Theatrophone apparatus recently exhibited at the Paris exhibitions. Worldcat lists 3 copies only: Bibliothèque nationale, British Library and Yale.

A calligraphic certificate by Julia Beck, being the copy of a letter of 8 June 1914 sent by a leader of the women’s movement in France, Isabelle Bogelot to Canadian feminist, Lady Aberdeen endorsing the new book by Indiana feminist, May Wright-Sewell, entitled Genesis of the International Council of Women (1914). It was written on behalf of the Conseil National des femmes françaises.

Calligrapher Julia Beck was born in Stockholm in 1853 and moved to Paris in 1883. She became one of the first female artists from her country to make a living through art alone. She is best-known for her landscape paintings in the Impressionist style, which were highly regarded in France and abroad, but she supported herself partly through commercial calligraphy, at which she excelled. She was a committed advocate for women artists.

A superb collection of over 300 spontaneous sketches made in situ in Paris of popular films and entertainments of the 1950s, including the classics Les Vacances de M. Hulot, Buñuel’s El, Le Ballon Rouge and other French films by Renoir and Meliès, Sophia Loren in Neapolitan Carousel, Bob Hope and Lucille Ball in Fancy Pants, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin in Artists and Models and Marilyn Monroe in Bus Stop.

Ryutchi Souzouki (1904-1985) had been a well-regarded and well-connected Montparnasse figure, counting Ernst and Foujita among his friends in the twenties and thirties and frequently exhibiting alongside the surrealists. Born in Yokohama, he spent much of his life in Paris, though his Japanese citizenship prevented him from exhibiting during the war years and probably accounted for his increasing isolation in the post war period. A solitary figure, until his death in poverty, he continued to work, experimenting with automatic drawing and making sketches, such as these, from popular films and entertainments, such as the tableaux vivants of the Casino de Paris, the Folies bergères, conjuring performances and the opera, instantaneously capturing their spirit on scraps of hotel stationery, recycled scraps or cheap spiral-bound notebooks. They are witty, touching and always engaging responses to what he saw in the cinemas and theatres of Paris. Following his death, the contents of his studio, including the many albums he had carefully collated in his final years (like ours) were conserved by his concièrge and dispersed at auction in 1985.

1949-53, 1953-6, 1953-4, 1956-7, 1962

First edition with Sigros’s illustrations, tirage de tête, one of 16 copies with a suite and an original drawing (total edition 1500).

First edition with Colucci’s superb illustrations, one of 125 copies on Rives (after a single copy on japon). A decadent edition of one of the six novellas from Les Diaboliques (1874). ‘The She-Devils’, considered D’Aurevilley masterpiece, collects six stories, each featuring a woman who commits an act of violence, revenge, or some other crime. Colucci had exhibited alongside Gleizes and Delaunay in the 1920s, but was especially successful as a book illustrator.

A superb art nouveau decorated manuscript, copied and entirely illuminated by a M. Jullien with geometric designs inspired by Renaissance and Islamic tiles, entirely in keeping with the Orientalist symbolism of the 56 poems by Henri de Régnier (1864-1936), one of the most significant French Symbolist poets. The binding is decorated by Jullien in pyrography in a complementary style

A very appealing romantic era book of drawing designs for children, with animals, flowers, occupations and costumes. Not located in Worldcat.

A spectacular manual and sample book for the typically-French craft of passmenterie: the production of decorative silk braid, trimmings and tassels. As these samples demonstrate, designs could be extraordinarily intricate, expressed as pixel-like coloured cells on graph paper which were then produced in silk using a variety of weaving, twisting and braiding techniques. The French pioneered the craft in the later middle ages and became pre-eminent in its production (with Diderot’s Encyclopédie devoting a long illustrated article on it) and supplying a worldwide market by the end of the nineteenth century. The examples in this album cover a wide range, with complex woven plaids, often with fringes and a wonderful series of 8 coloured silk feathers. The manuscript elements include weaving patterns and tables for the calculation of silk quantities.

First edition, unique copy extra-illustrated with the 41 preliminary pencil drawings by Bosschère. An inscription to the half title reads: ‘This copy of “Gulliver’s Travels” containing Mr Jean de Bosschère’s original pencil-drawings for the illustrations, has been specially made for Mrs Leon M. Lion. Jan. 1921’. Leon Marks Lion was a prolific early film actor and later theatrical manager.

Belgian-born in 1878, de Bosschère’s early illustrations were very much in the symbolist/occult style of Beardsley. After fleeing to London on the eve of war, de Bosschère was to become one of the important illustrators of the early century, and became associated with Huxley, Lawrence, Pound and Eliot, among other literary figures.

FIRST EDITION with the striking art deco illustrations by Claude Remusat, inscribed by Dekobra to Robert Dupont in 1932. All plates hand-coloured (probably by the artist). One of 600 copies. Decadent poems, many on the subject of drugs (cocaine and morphine) and contemporary Parisian street life, the first edition of which, with different illustrations, had appeared in 1924.

A delightful example of Japanese art of flower arrangement, ikebana, in the form of 24 ‘Rikka Zu’ (flower arrangements), with an important provenance. The arrangements combine boughs of trees or bamboo. with flowers including chrysanthemums, lotus, lilies, irises, and cherry blossom. The style is deliberately and strikingly asymmetrical, with stems tightly bundled at the foot in keeping with prevailing decorative aesthetics.

The manuscript is dated, on the first extant image, Kansei 4 (1792) July 7th and there is a further inscription to the verso of one fold, now partly obscured by a paper strip (an old reinforcement) but still legible. It reads: ‘The lord Todo Izumino-kami, when his ambassador’s mission at Kyoto had a celebration in Ryokan’ and ‘Ikeno bo’. Ikenobo was the oldest and most important school of ikebana in Japan, founded at Kyoto in the fifteenth century, while the Todo clan were an ancient Samurai family with origins in the sixteenth century. The manuscript may be considerably older than the inscription of 1792. Its style is closely comparable with a manuscript now at Cambridge, Ikenobō rikka no zu (CUL FJ.978.12) dated to the ‘seventeenth or eighteenth century’ (2223 in Hayashi and Kornicki, Early Japanese books in Cambridge University Library).

A striking and beautiful single sheet of brokatpapier, with devotional images printed in gilt in a style usually associated with Augsburg. This uncut sheet may have been destined for endpapers, each image neatly fitting an octavo-sized book.

The narrative pedigree of a royal librarian: François Damant (c. 1535-1611) and his brother Nicolas (c. 1531-1616). François was Conseiller and Garde joyaux (i.e. keeper of the library) to the Duke of Burgundy, Philip II, King of Spain in the Netherlands and afterwards to his son Phillip III. His name appears in numerous manuscripts and records relating to the library and he was also a member of the Order of the Golden Fleece (Toison d’or) from 1587. He was son of Pierre Damant (1503-68), also of the Toison d’or and a royal librarian in his time. His brother Nicolas, who shares this pedigree was an official in the Habsburg government of Flanders and became Chancellor of Brabant and served Phillip II as a Councillor of State, Garde des sceaux and Garde joyaux, before (as is narrated in the pedigree) moving to Madrid when the centre of administration of the Austrian Netherlands moved there in 1698. The gruesome story of how and why he was granted two dogs (gros chiens) and a crown as part of his coat of arms is also related here in the context of a royal hunt (chasse du sanglier) in which a boar was killed by the royal dogs in his presence.

The pedigree also records the marriages of both brothers: François to Louyse de Sicleers and Nicolas to Barbara Brant, and each couple having several children. The arms of both wives are included in the pedigree besides those of their husbands, the women’s arms in oval cartouches, the men’s in lozenges. The same distinction is applied to the arms of their various male and female children listed in the pedigree.

The scribe uses a neat French secretarial hand for most of the document, changing to an accomplished italic for describing elements of the blazons, following contemporary practice. The manuscript is foliated in a contemporary hand, presumably by the scribe, in ink at the top right hand corner. A later pencil pagination suggests it was later included (either loose or bound) in a much larger genealogical collection. The paper is watermarked with a hunting horn stringed within a shield (similar to Briquet 7867, dated there to 1586). Lemaire, Bibliothèque royale. Mémorial 1559-1969.

An engraved copper plate for an erotic work. A young man stands on an armchair, his erect member exposed, while observing an amorous couple through a large barred window

Hollar’s small format plates of European women and their costume are dated from 1642-4 and followed his successful series Ornatus muliebris Anglicanus of 1640. The plates were obtained by eighteenth-century printseller Robert Sayer, who issued them several times (with captions in English added) right up until his death in 1794. His widow may also have continued issuing and selling them into the early nineteenth-century. They are one of the best sources for seventeenth-century lay female dress and include several English subjects (A Noble Woman, a Merchant’s Wife of London, an English Gentlewoman, A Merchant’s Daughter, Lady of the Court, a Countrywoman etc) together with women of France, Ireland, Holland, Germany, Denmark, Belgium and Austria. Three of the plates at the end depict men of religious orders. cf. Colas 1466 (second edition of 1643); Lipperheide 30.

First edition, translations into French of popular Spanish songs/verses (’coplas’). García Caldéron was a journalist and poet, and a Pervian government official in Paris in the 1920s. The cover image is one of Beltràn Masses almost unknown designs.