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― An Act for establishing certain Regulations for the better Management of the Affairs of the East India Company, as well in India as in Europe. London: Charles Eyre and William Strahan, 1773. Folio (318 × 195 mm), pp. [2]. 1299-1327, [1] including general title with woodcut royal arms.
― An Act for the better Regulation and Management of the Affairs of the East India Company, and of the British Possessions in India; and for establishing a Court of Judicature for the more speedy and effectual Trial of Persons accused of Offences committed in the East Indies. [London, 1784]. Folio (310 × 195 mm), pp. 351-395, [1]. Without general title.
― An Act for the better Government of India. [2^nd August 1858.] [London: George Edward Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1858]. Folio (301 × 186 mm), pp. [1], 854-874. Woodcut arms to head of first page.

First editions of the three British Parliamentary Acts which shaped the colonial history of India ― first entrusting government to the East India Company, then establishing power-sharing between the Company and the British government, and finally establishing direct British rule and the Raj after the rebellion of 1857 (the so-called ‘Indian Mutiny). ‘The act of 1773, also known as the Regulating Act, set up a governor-general of Fort William in Bengal with supervisory powers over Madras (now Chennai) and Bombay (now Mumbai). Pitt’s India Act (1784), named for the British prime minister William Pitt the Younger, established the dual system of control by the British government and the East India Company, by which the company retained control of commerce and day-to-day administration but important political matters were reserved to a secret committee of three directors in direct touch with the British government; this system lasted until 1858 … The act of 1858 transferred most of the company’s powers to the crown.’ (Britannica). 
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 paginations here. Of the two eighteenth-century acts, only the first retains its general title. All three acts preserved in recent wrappers to style.

A spectacular album containing 65 views and scenes in Northern India at the close of the nineteenth century, with superb images of Benares, Lucknow, Cawnpore, Agra, Delhi and Mussoorie. together with several fine photographs of Indian workers, notably in the tea plantations of Chaubatia. Included is a series of haunting images of the ruins of the imperial residency at Lucknow, which was largely destroyed in the Indian rebellion of 1857, and a view of the site of the massacre at Cawnpore. The first two photographs in the album are signed in ink by G.W. Lawrie and given the style, period and geography of the remainder it is likely they are also by the studio of this prolific Scottish-born photographer. Six final photographs are of Port Said, Egyptians, Armenians and are Sudanians, of which some after French photographer Hippolyte Arnoux.
1. Juggernaut Cr. Mysore. 2. A Mysore temple. 3. Marble rocks. Jubbulpore. 4. Indore. Tomb of the late Mahraja [Tukojirao Holkar II]. 5. View from Cheena. ‘Naini Tal’. 6. Naini Tal. 7. Loucun. Naini Tal. 8. Naini Tal – showing lake. 9. Group of hill coolies. 10. Naini Tal group of hill women. 11. A picturesque bit on the road from Ranikhet. 12. Grass cutters. Chowbattia. 13. Group of women sorting tea. Chowbattia. 14. Tea sorting. Chowbattia. 15. Simla. 16. Bridge of boats. Benares. 17. The great mosque of Aurenzebe [Aurangzebe]. Benares. 18. Benares. Cremation Ghal. Showing Hindu burning their dead. 19. Buddhist carving. Benares. 20. Golden temple. Benares. 21. Bailey Guard Gate. Lucknow. 22. The Residency. Lucknow. 23. The Residency Ruins. Lucknow. 24. The Residency. Lucknow. 25. Lucknow. The Residency showing the Shannon’s guns. 26. Interior view of Fort. Lucknow. 27. Lucknow. The great Emambara & Mosque. 28. View from clock tower. Lucknow. 29. A gateway. Lucknow. 30. A gateway. Lucknow [untitled, another view]. 31. The Hossainabad. Lucknow. 32. Hossainabad Emambara. Lucknow. 33. Wingfield Park. Lucknow. 34. Lucknow. The first King of Oudh, Mausoleum. 35. Dilkoosha Palace ruins. Lucknow. 36. Dilkoosha Palace. Lucknow. 37. Sadut Ali Shah’s Mausoleum. Lucknow. 38. Ornamental Gate. Lucknow. 39. Memorial Well. Cawnpore. 40. Suttee Chowra Ghat. Scene of the Massacre. Cawnpore. 41. Gateway of Taj. Agra. 42. The Marble Taj. Agra. 43. The Taj from the river. Agra. 44. Agra. The marble screen around the tomb inside Taj. 45. Motte Musjid Mosque. Agra. 46. The Mausoleum of Akbar. Secundra [Sikandra]. 47. Elephant in masonry. Delhi. 48. The Cashmere Gate. Delhi. 49. Arhai-din-kar-jhopra temple. Ajmere. 50. Ancient carved pillars, in the fortress. Gwalior. 51. The Mall. Mussoorie. 52. A bit of bazaar. Mussoorie. 53. General view. Mussoorie. 54. Kempty Falls. Mussoorie. 55. General view. Mussoorie. 56. The snow. Cashmere. 57. Cashmere. 58. Cashmere. 59 & 60. Indian Servants (2 smaller images 150 × 110 mm). 61 & 62. Indian Servants (2 smaller images 150 × 110 mm). 63 & 64. Indian Servants (2 images 150 × 110 mm). 64 & 65. Goorkha. Indian Soldiers (2 images 150 × 110 mm). 66. Port Said. 67. Armenian Girl. 68. Armenians. 69. Egyptian water carrier (after Arnoux). 70. Egyptians (after Arnoux). 71. Soudaniens. (after Arnoux).

A series of eighteen superb photographs of processions of Indian princes and soldiers at the Delhi Durbar. The 1903 Durbar was held to commemorate the coronation of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra as Emperor and Empress of India --- the King and Queen did not attend but were represented by the Duke of Connaught and the Viceroy Lord Curzon (both appearing in these photographs). Many of the Indian princes rode on elephants (depicted in six of the photographs here) and were dressed in their finest costumes and jewels. Three of the prints depict the Durbar amphitheatre and Viceroy’s pavilion forming a panorama of connected images. The Durbar was also the occasion for the opening of the Delhi exhibition, the biggest display of Indian arts and crafts hitherto assembled, and the exhibition building is the subject of two of the prints here.

Photographer Sidney Herbert Dagg (1862-1930) moved to India in 1891 and worked as an assistant to G.W.Lawrie (G. W. Lawrie & Co) before establishing his own firm, with offices at Mussoorie and Allahabad.

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.

First edition of this important attempt at a universal non-sectarian liturgy, inspired by David Williams and Benjamin Franklin’s London Philosophical ‘Club of Thirteen’. It extended Williams’s experiments as minister to a Highgate Presbyterian congregation, reflecting contemporary debates around the Thirty-Nine Articles, and was widely influential notably in France, where it was applauded by both Rousseau and Voltaire.

The Club of Thirteen was a Radical intellectual club, rather like the Birmingham Lunar Society, and its members included Williams, Franklin, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Josiah Wedgwood, Robert Owen, William Hodgson, and Thomas Day. It met at Old Slaughter's Coffee House on St Martin's Lane, or at the Swan at Westminster Bridge.

‘On Easter Sunday, 7 April 1776, Williams opened a chapel in Margaret Street, Cavendish Square, and read from the Liturgy on the Universal Principles of Religion and Morality, the collaborative production of members of the Club of Thirteen... The preface to this universalist Liturgy of 1776 describes the experiment as a form of social worship 'in which all men may join who acknowledge the existence of a supreme intelligence, and the universal obligations of morality' (Liturgy, x–xi). Its format, containing an order for morning and for evening prayer and a collection of hymns and psalms, is reminiscent of an Anglican format, but the liturgy avoids all dogmatic statements of belief beyond an acknowledgement of the wisdom and goodness of a supreme intelligence and the moral obligations of a simple deism that celebrates nature as implying the existence of God. All specifically Christian doctrines of faith are carefully excluded. Copies of the liturgy were sent to Voltaire and Frederick the Great of Prussia, and in Paris in the summer of 1776 Bentley presented a copy to Rousseau. All three responded enthusiastically. Voltaire wrote: It is a great comfort to me, at the age of eighty-two years, to see the tolerance openly teach’d in your country, and the God of all mankind no more pent up in a narrow tract of land. That notable truth was worthy of your pen and of your tongue’ (Oxford DNB). Though quite well-represented in British collections, ESTC lists US copies at Union Theological Seminary and Penn only; Worldcat adds Columbia, Yale and Emory. It is notably scarce in commerce with Rare Book Hub recording no copies at auction.

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.

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 edition of this rare little treatise of cat lore by an author who describes herself as a portière and which is dedicated to the ‘Dames, veuves et demoiselles françaises et étrangères’. It is full of practical advice on behaviour, diet and health and is proceeded by a literary and historial éloge and ended by a drama for a cast of cats: ‘Les Chats, tragédie lyrique’. One chapter gives detailed instructions for feline taxidermy. Worldcat lists the Penn library copy as the only location outside continental Europe.

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.

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.

In ‘The Tumultuous Ocean’ Montanus chronicled the Anglo-Dutch war 1652-1654, largely fought in the English Channel and North Sea between the two great European navies ― the Dutch force under the command of Maarten Tromp the English under Robert Blake and General Monck. The major engagements included the Battles of the Kentish Knock (fought in the mouth of the Thames estuary), Dungeness, Portland and Scheveningen (in which Tromp was killed). The fine engraved plates of De beroerde Oceaan are remarkable miniaturisations of scenes by marine artist Jan Abrahamsz Beertraten engraved by Jodocus Hondius (III) and include topographical views of both the English coast (mainly Sussex and Kent) and well as the French and Dutch. The engraved title is a striking satirical emblem of the English Commonwealth government, its two-faced head looking backwards and forwards as it tramples the figure of Neptune and kicks the English crown before it.
This is probably the second edition, the first with these plates, another edition probably earlier the same year (but undated) has a different and reversed version of the frontispiece bearing the imprint of Cornelis Janssen, pp. 368 text in black letter and only 6 plates. A third edition appeared in 1656.

An important proposal for the establishment of a school for deaf-mute pupils (form the age of six onwards) run on Moret’s method of lipreading, developed by himself in the course of a government-sponsored trial. Education for such pupils had hitherto been conducted according to the sign-language methods of Charles-Michel de l’Épée (1712-1789), alluded to in this text. Moret announces his success in teaching by his ‘entendre des yeux’ method in allowing the student to then express themselves naturally ‘de vive voix et d’un ton nature’ and to thus experience the same level of education as the hearing. The memoir is apparently unpublished.
Little is known of Moret, and his petition appears not to have been accepted, but his methods were widely noticed. John England, in his 1819 Treatise on the Education of the Deaf and Dumb announced the success of Moret’s experiments proclaiming them ‘highly interesting to humanity’ adding: ‘This unexampled success, which appears almost a phenomenon, evinces indubitably, that M. de Moret has arrived at the highest stage of perfection in the art of teaching the deaf and dumb, which has hitherto been attained’ (Dominic W Stiles, on 27 September 2013 UCL Ear Institute & Action on Hearing Loss Libraries).

A very rare complete set of both text and game box wth pieces, in a superb state of preservation. Berthaud’s reading method Quadrille des enfants, described as ‘une méthode [qui] parle aux yeux et auc oreilles’ was well-known since the 1740s, but was elaborated in the early nineteenth century, with additional stories and an accompanying box of game pieces. The book was also popular in English as Syllabic Spelling, or a Summary Method of teaching Children to Read (1820 and later editions),
The coloured diagrams (with 20 or 24 vignettes each, giving a total of 84) consist of finely coloured pictograms corresponding to the letters given in the letterpress tables. These are reproduced on the 84 coloured bone game pieces, where the pictograms and letters are pasted to both sides of each piece.
The text volume here is described as the fifteenth edition on its title, with a publisher’s address suggesting a publication date of 1830. On the basis of the very few surviving copies, it appears that the game box was added from at least the ninth edition of 1828, but it is very rare for a text and box to survive together in any edition. Sets complete with all 84 game pieces in almost perfect condition, as here, must be almost unknown. Not in Gumuchian or Cotsen (the latter describing a copy of the text only dated 1815, prior to the addition of the game box). The Cotsen collection at Princeton does, however, also contain an example of the game dated c. 1840s.

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.

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.