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A complete set of the small plates for Le Brun’s influential artists’ manual, Conférence sur l’expression générale des passions (lectures at the French Académie royale given between 1668 and 1678, but not printed until 1698). They are preserved in their original uncut state, four plates to an uncut sheet. Each sheet retains the stab holes for stitching in oblong format, probably the form in which they were issued by Picart, with the plates reorientated here when bound on guards in the nineteenth century. They were evidently sold separately, uncut as here, but were also issued dissected with the small format editions of the Conférence.

Le Brun had lectured on the expression of emotions and produced a set of drawings to illustrate tranquility, admiration, desire, apprehension, joy, sadness, contempt and hatred, jealousy, and despair and fury. The lectures and the illustrations (’expressive heads’) were not published until 1698, when they appeared as Caractères des Passions which swiftly became one of the principal artists’ manual and was reprinted several times within a few decades, including in English. These Picart plates ‘correspond to [the first edition] with the addition of eleven new plates, except for fig. no. 34. Here, for the first time, the previously rather strange head-dress of this figure has been clearly represented as a metal helmet, thus making it easier to recognise in it Rhosaces, the man about to strike Alexander in the Battle of the Granicus’ (Montagu).

This set bears the stamp and spine title of the Pictura Groningen (the stamp being Lugt 2028); a print collection now widely dispersed. Jennifer Montagu, The Expression of the Passions. The Origin and Influence of Chalres Le Brun’s Conférence sur lexpression générale et particulière (Yale, 1994) B.8.

A movie-enthusiast’s notebooks - filled with striking coloured portraits of male characters in films popular in the Netherlands, including Dutch-language versions of The Thirteenth Chair (1929 film); Madame Sans-gêne (1925 film); Maria Stuart (1927); The Trial of Mary Dugan (1931); Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, Shaw’s How He Lied to Her Husband; Jonson’s Volpone; Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, King Lear and Macbeth. The anonymous albums are numbered in pencil, suggesting they were part of a larger group.

Second edition (first, 1651) of this history of England up to the death of Charles I. It was translated into English as Florus Anglicus: or An exact history of England, from the raign of William the Conqueror to the death of Charles the I. By Lambert Wood gent (1656).

‘Second edition’, but actually the third, the first edition having appeared in 1701 and a second in 1710. It is accompanied by the third edition of the companion volume. These are especially valuable in providing technical translations for many specialist terms used in the trades, industries, crafts and commerce of the eighteenth century.

An attractive polyglot New Testament. Arranged in three columns of miniature type throughout, the French text is the Geneva version, the English text the Authorized version, and the Dutch text the States-General version. The engraved title is followed by the Estates General’s privilege leaf, dated 1683. This copy is from the collection of Quaker mathematician and teacher John Jackson of Warrington (1793-1875) bequeathed to the town of Warrington. British and Foreign Bible Society Library, Historical Catalogue of printed Editions of the Bible, 1450 (Polyglot), 626 (English), 3329 (Dutch), 3768 (French).