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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.

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.

A reissue of the rare Logic, Ontology, and the Art of Poetry (London, Carnan & Newbery, 1776; Roscoe J67), with a cancel title-page and conjugate plate. With a 7-page Newbery catalogue at the end. ‘The imprint is false; probably printed at York for Wilson, Spence and Mawman’ (ESTC).

An intriguing reissue of the sheets of a collective volume of John Newbery’s Circle of the Sciences (for which he wrote the poetry analysis), first published more than twenty years earlier, in 1776. The works themselves originally appeared separately, in 1748 and 1746 respectively, and in the 1776 collected volume are described as ‘considerably enlarged, and greatly improved’. How the sheets then got from Newbery to ‘A. Millar’ (i.e. Wilson?) et al. is a mystery.

This issue is very rare. ESTC records only the British Library and Yale copies; WorldCat adds two more, at Wagner College and Wyoming. Alston VII, 274; not in Roscoe.

[bound after:]

—————. Abelard to Eloisa: a Poem... London: Printed for J. Robson... 1792. [And:]

—————. Enthusiasm: a Poem. In two Parts... London: Printed for J. Robson and W. Clarke, Booksellers... 1789.

3 works in one vol., 4to (273 × 220 mm); The Shakespeare Gallery: pp. [8], 24; complete with half-title; final page spotted; Abelard to Eloisa: pp. [2], vii, [1], 15, [1]; complete with half-title (light foxing); Enthusiasm: pp. [4], 33, [1]; early ms. ink correction to p. 2; the title-page to Abelard to Eloisa inscribed in pencil ‘Presented to Mr Bull’, presumably Jerningham’s friend, Richard Bull of Ongar; slightly later half calf, rubbed, upper joint cracked but firm.

First editions. The Shakspeare Gallery is a tribute to John Boydell’s great collection of commissioned and other paintings illustrating passages from Shakespeare, not to ‘pass judgment upon the Pictures... but... to point out new subjects for future exhibitions’ (Advertisement). Abelard to Eloisa, dedicated to the Earl of Carlisle, ‘possesses no small portion of the fire of its great archetype [i.e. Pope, Eloisa to Abelard, 1717], and exhibits the tenderness and best of passions with elegance and force’ (English Review). Jackson, pp. 170, 172, 148.

First edition of Hayley’s first separately published work, an ‘ingenious and well-written poem’ (Monthly Review) addressed to Hayley’s close friend, George Romney. ‘John Romney later regarded Hayley as a bad influence on his father, but Hayley’s company acted as a release for many of the suppressed tensions in Romney’s life. In the critical vacuum in which Romney worked, Hayley’s constant encouragement and flattery provided a much-needed boost to morale. His invitations to Romney to visit his country house at Eartham in Sussex, where Romney spent several weeks every summer or autumn, gave him the opportunity to relax, to paint and draw in a more liberated manner, and to meet stimulating company among Hayley’s friends in an unthreatening atmosphere’ (Oxford DNB). Barker, ‘Some notes on the bibliography of William Hayley, Part I’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society Vol. 3, No. 1 (1959), pp. 103-112, 1; Jackson, p. 65.

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.

From the Masterpieces in Colour series edited by T.L. Hare.

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.