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A rare perspective peepshow view of Venice. Engelbrecht (1684-1756) produced many different designs of these sets in three sizes, of which ours is an example of the smallest (and rarest). They were designed to be viewed when slotted successively into a perspective viewing box but can equally be appreciated when standing in simple slots or stands. One of the parts is marked ‘N. 87’ in the plate. In this example the prints have been mounted in the early nineteenth-century. cf. Ralph Hyde, Paper Peepshows (2015), pp. 14–15 and David Robinson, ‘Augsburg Peepshows’, Print Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 2 (June 1988), pp. 188–191.�

A broadside catalogue of misogyny — with familiar and unfamiliar citations from Genesis, Augustine, Jonas, John Chrysostom, Gregory, Origen, Cato, Jerome, Tertullian, Plato and Pythagoras. Evidently intended as a satire it is known in more than one imprint, from France and from Ghent, but with only a small handful recorded in library collections. The Bibliothèque nationale holds two, one of which is digitised (having a woodcut, rather than typographical, headpiece).

The sheet apparently already had a central horizontal crease when placed under the press, resulting in a blank horizontal line across the centre, portions of the affected letters arranged (without loss) above and below.

First edition of this rare explanatory pamphlet issued to accompany the 1837 issue of Samuel Cousins’ popular engraving after Wilkie. The engraved key gives a numbered explanation of the picture while the text gives the historical account, complete with excerpts from Byron.

David Wilkie’s celebrated painting of 1828, immediately purchased for the Royal Collection commemorates the two-month siege of Saragossa in 1808, when the local guerrilla leader Don José de Palafox y Melci led heroic, ill-equipped citizens to victory. This episode in the Spanish struggle for independence from Napoleon had also been commemorated in poetry and prose, most notably by Byron in ‘Childe Harold's Pilgrimage’. In the picture Agostina Zaragoza (the ‘Maid of Saragossa’) lights the fuse in the cannon which Palafox, dressed as a volunteer, directs with Father Consolaçion, an Augustinian friar. Worldcat lists the Harvard copy only.

First edition of this rousing patriotic endorsement of French manufactures, with its invocation of the might of the king, on the eve of the Revolution. A ‘France First’ manifesto, it insists on the primacy of French metalwork, silks, and cloth — pointing out that women could demonstrate their patriotism by renouncing plain white mousseline dresses (from Eastern sources). It insists on domestic linen manufacture, which could be a source of employment for sixty thousand people and on the imposition of means-related taxation. Peddling (‘colportage’) or other unregulated trade is to be strictly forbidden. It is signed at the end ‘R..... patriote’. Worldcat: UCB, Newberry, Harvard and Toronto in North America.

First edition, with author’s signature at the end of the preface and with various small manuscript corrections, presumably editorial. An exhaustive proposal for a post-Revolutionary national bank based on property the title bears Mengin’s statement his aim: ‘Fonder l’intérêt public sur l’intérêt particulier, les concilier pour l’avantage général de tous ces citoyens, multiplier les richesses nationales, tel est l’unique but de cet ouvrage’ (‘Basing the public interest on private interest, reconciling them for the general advantage of all citizens, multiplying national wealth, such is the sole aim of this work)’. The folding tables include models for four different credit notes: Papier rouge, papier bleu, papier jaune and papier vert.

First edition of this rather extraordinary survey of Curzon’s many appearances in caricature in Hindi Punch and other Indian comic papers, where he often appears in Indian dress and frequently as various Hindu deities (notably Ganesh). ‘This unpretentious little book is offered as a humble souvenir of the Delhi Durbar: in its pages our popular Viceroy, as representative in the great Coronation Durbar, of the greatest monarch of modern times, is the central figure. In a land of her-worship it is not to be marvelled that the energy, versatility and strong personality of Lord Curzon, added to his many loveable traits, should lend themselves easily to the genius of the Indian artist for caricaturing’ (author’s Preface).

Despite this warm introduction, Curzon was subject to both approval and dissent through these images. The satire of British comic publications like Punch was enthusiastically appropriated by Indian artists - and India itself was frequently represented through the figure of Mr Punch - though their caricatures were also influenced by Indian artists such as Raja Ravi Varma. It is a fascinating fusion.

An early seventeenth-century heraldic pedigree of the Offley family of Madeley (Staffordshire) with the arms of their prominent dynasty of London guildsmen, which include Henry Offley (d. 1613) who had married Mary, the daughter of Sir John White Lord Mayor of London; and Thomas Offley (1501-1582), a successful wool and cloth merchant — Lord Mayor of London in 1556. Also in the lineage is Stephen Jenyns (1453-1523) another important London Lord Mayor with Wolverhampton origins whose arms are accompanied by an elaborate cartouche noting his mayoralty. An early docket on the verso (legible with ultra-violet light) reads: ‘The Pedigree of Stephen Jenings’.

The youngest member of the Offley family shown is John (b. 1586). He was educated at Middle Temple and married in 1605. He was knighted in April 1615, served as sheriff of Staffordshire in 1616-17 and was a magistrate for the county by 1621. 1625-6 he was MP for Stafford. Another contemporary version of the pedigree is described in the Staffordshire Visitation of 1614:

‘Quarterly — 1. Argent, on a cross fleurettée azure a lion passant-guardant or [OFFLEY]; 2. Azure, a chevron between two eagles displayed in chief and a lion passant in base or [NECHELLS]; 3. Argent, a chevron gules between three plummets sable [JENNINGS]; 4. Azure, a tiger passant or [LANE]. CREST— A demi-lion rampant-guardant or, holding an olive branch vert, fructed gold’ (’Heraldic Visitations of Staffordshire in 1614 and 1663-64’, in History of Staffordshire, 1884).

First edition, copy number 7 of 100, of this sumptuously illustrated version of the story of the Queen of Sheba, combining illustrations by Barbier and the Abyssinian artist Michel Engueda-Work. French scholar, traveller and diplomat, Hughes Le Roux had transcribed parts of the Ethiopian chronicle Kebra Nagast in 1904, with the help of local scholars, from a manuscript looted by the British at Maqdala and subsequently returned. The Kebra Nagast or ‘The Glory of the Kings,’ is a fourteenth-century national epic of Ethiopia, written in Geʽez by the nebure id Ishaq of Aksum. In its existing form, the text is at least 700 years old and purports to trace the origins of the Solomonic dynasty, a line of Ethiopian Orthodox Christian monarchs who ruled the country (until 1974), to the biblical king, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.

The story of the text’s survival is interesting. The Battle of Maqdala, the last struggle in the British Expedition to Abyssinia, led to significant looting by the victorious British forces, who took Emperor Tewodros II’s crown along with ceremonial crosses, chalices, weapons and the holy icon Kwer’ata Re’esu along with two fine manuscripts of the Kebra Nagast which found their way to the British Museum (catalogued as Oriental MS 818 and 819 respectively). 819 was returned to Ethiopia in 1872 on the request of the Abyssinian king, who identified it as a fundamental source of law. Hugues Le Roux, a French envoy from the President of the French Republic to Menyelek II, King of Ethiopia, later went to Addis Alem in order to see this manuscript and to obtain his permission to translate it into French. He notes in his introduction here the inscription ‘This volume was returned to the King of Ethiopia by order of the Trustees of the British Museum, Dec. 14th, 1872’. Of the artist Michel Engueda-Work who is referred to elsewhere as an ‘Abyssinian artist’, almost nothing else is known, but his illustrations are of course far truer to the Ethiopian style than Barbier’s highly exoticised and eroticised interpretations, in which Sheba is portrayed (following long tradition) as a white woman.

First edition. Blondel (1705-1774) was among the most influential French architects of his day and De la Distribution des Maisons de Plaisance provides one of the most extensive and best-illustrated accounts of Enlightenment taste in both houses and gardens with its many plates, elevations and plans. This copy is of the second issue, giving ‘rue Dauphine’ as the printer’s address, issued without half-titles or errata, but otherwise identical to the first issue of the same year.

‘As a teacher, first in his own school (1743–54) and later at the Académie Royale d’Architecture, Blondel influenced such students as the Scottish architect William (later Sir William) Chambers, best known for his Somerset House for the Royal Academy of Arts in London (1776; later replaced); the French architect Richard Mique, who did much work for Marie-Antoinette at Versailles’ (Ency. Brit.). Fowler 49.

First edition of this superbly illustrated account of Girardin’s garden at Ermenonville, which was inspired both by the philosophy of Rousseau and the English landscape gardens of the eighteenth century. It was to become Rousseau’s resting place, within an elaborate tomb on an island in the Lac de peupliers. The delightful aquatint plates here depict the philosophical temple, picturesque grottoes and torrents. It as reprinted in 1811. Much of what Girardin created was destroyed in the Revolutionary era. Cohen-De Ricci 439; Hunt 695.

A rare publisher’s advert for a short-lived satirical almanac devoted to the comic lowlife of the Parisian Latin Quarter, with its famously hedonistic students and lorettes courtesans or sex workers). The lorette emerged both in reality and in the popular imagination during the July Monarchy (1830-48), named after the Right Bank church of Notre Dame de Lorette where they were thought to reside and the almanac promises a range of playful gender inverting fun based on the ‘Vésuviennes’ (popular heroines of the 1848 revolution who donned uniform and took to the barricades) including the confessions of a Vésuvienne and their ‘Charte-Constitution’.
During the February Revolution of 1848, French women briefly hoped for political rights and an improvement in their social situation. Such hopes were short-lived and popular reaction was expressed in satires like this. The complex image of the Vésuvienne woman warrior, both pleasantly seductive and scandalously rebellious. She appeared in all the major newspapers, while real women in the streets claimed this title by parading under a Vesuvian banner. Their morality was often called into question and it is no surprise to see lorettes and Vésuviennes share a billing here. In Belhomme’s lithograph, three lorettes step out of basket (one thumbing her nose); a reflection of a popular contemporary song ‘Le Panier aux lorettes’.

First edition of the last book by a prolific French clairvoyant — in the form of a decree from the gods of Mount Olympus, this is a spirited plea in favour of the Duchesse de Berry then imprisoned for leading a rebellion against Charles X after the July Revolution. Like Le Normand’s other works it is couched in terms of dreams, predictions and angelic interventions. It bears her signature on the back of the half-title as a measure against piracy and the frontispiece shows her taking the Duchesse’s hand in prison, as an angel swoops down to crown her.

Marie-Anne Le Normand (1772–1843) was a celebrated (or notorious) clairvoyant, publisher, booskeller and self-publicist Famed throughout Europe for her exclusive clientele, she popularised cartomancy and spawned an enormous wave of imitators. At the height of her career she claimed to have advised the likes of Robespierre, Talleyrand, Metternich, the Empress Josephine and Emperor Alexander himself; others argued that the whole thing was a sham, and she was frequently arrested, spending several weeks in prison.

A rare broadside offering a proposal to put the poor (’Beggars, or idle stroling persons’) to work in the making of sail-cloth in a workhouse ‘to be built, in some convenient Place near the River Thames, within five Miles of London, to be managed by Governors, Gratis, in the Nature of St. Thomas’s’ Hospital.’ Its anonymous author notes ‘That... many Thousands of Men, Women, and Children are daily stroling about these great Cities of London and Westminster, without Employment, and having found, by Begging and Pilfering, an easier Way of Maintenance, than by Working, do initiate and train up their Children therein, as if it was a lawful Trade: Insomuch that they are become insolent, and often disturb People in the Streets and Houses by Day, and render them unsafe by Nights...’

The item appears in Wing ( L1366A) which suggests 1697 as an unlikely date of publication. It is more likely to date from c. 1731 when an ‘Act for Further Encouraging the Manufacture of British Sail Cloth’ was passed in Parliament — the broadside’s author notes the the Commons have recently considered methods of encouraging the manufacture of sail-cloth. Goldsmiths’-Kress no. 06901.1.

First published in Latin in 1520, this is considered the first ethnographic compendium of the Early Modern period in Europe, a collection of the manners and customs of all mankind, as it was then known to most Europeans. It considers Africa, Asia and Europe. It first appeared in French in 1540. Its first appearance in English was as William Waterman’s The Fardle of Facions in 1555 and it was printed in forty-seven editions between 1535 and 1620. British Library and Bibliothèque nationale only in WorldCat. Atkinson, La Littérature géographique fraņçaise de la Renaissance: répertoire bibliographique (Paris, 1927), n° 73.

A large and full album containing accomplished watercolours and a selection of contemporary prints.
The original drawings and watercolours here (together with the more significant prints) display a distinctly romantic sensibility, with mountain and lakeland scenes (and more than a hint of the cult of the sublime) and other rural subjects of cottages and cottagers. Some of the views are obviously of Britain, while others are continental (specifically alpine). The majority are unsigned, though a number are by the same very accomplished amateur hand, with others by less schooled, perhaps juvenile hands. The whole assemblage is typical of the culture of early Victorian album- and scrapbook keeping, where a female compiler (often a mother) brought together contributions from family, friends and visitors, sometimes recording their travels, but including also subjects painted at home or copied or adapted from other sources. In the latter category are found a fine series of flower paintings, together with drawings in pencil and crayon of animals, a female reader, a cottager with a bundle of firewood, and so on. The principal artist, who contributes the largest and best watercolour views may well be identifiable as Mary Leighton, née Parker (1799-1864), a northern British artist whose work is represented in a sequence of albums closely comparable to ours at the Yale Center for British Art (MSS 16). Not only is the range of materials of our album similar in each case (including watercolour contributions from Leighton’s brother, John Parker) but the style of the best watercolours is close to those by Leighton (examples of here work are digitised by the YCBA, notably the watercolour of Lake Maggiore catalogued as B2009.9.68 in the Printed and Drawings collection, together with others in the V&A collection in London). A recent northern provenance for the album further supports that likelihood.
The contents include:
Six fine watercolours of rural scenes (one mountainous, another captioned ‘Cottage. From nature’), several other sepia watercolour views, probably by the same hand. All unsigned.
Pencil drawing, Warwick Castle, signed ?C.W.W. May 29^th, 1821.
Twelve watercolours of flowers and fruit (including sweet peas, auricula, a rose, geranium, fuchsia and two mixed bouquets). Unsigned.
Silhouette portrait (perhaps a self portrait) of the prolific society silhouettist Auguste Édouart (1789-1861), signed, 1831, mounted on an elaborate lithograph background, plus one other silhouette without background, possibly also his work.
Two watercolour miniatures (85 × 115 mm) by John Parker (1798-1860) of mountain views in North Wales: Trevaen (Tryfan) and Snowdon (Yr Wyddfa), signed, dated 1824 and with manuscript descriptions on versos.
A circular miniature (diameter 85 mm) in sepia wash of a woodland grotto scene, mounted on a bifolium with manuscript caption in German dated 1818 signed Rösel, the miniature attributable to Johann Gottlob Samuel Rösel (1768-1843).
Four large alpine engravings/lithographs (Montblanc, Hospice de Grimsel, Hospice du St Bernard, Chamounix), elaborately hand-coloured.
Numerous usually smaller pencil or crayon drawings, including rural or cottage scenes, animals (a pig and a donkey), marine scenes, children at play, a girl reading etc. In several hands of different competence.
Larger prints include: ‘The Late King’ (Hullmandel, after 1830); ‘Oaklands near Newnham, Gloucestershire’ (Haghe, ?c. 1830s); ‘Rev. Richard Raikes’ [founder of the Sunday School movement] (Hullmandel, n.d.); ‘The Thames Tunnel’ [Harding/Dixie, hand-coloured lithograph, c. 1835]; ‘L’Ingrat’ (Hullmandel, after 1832); ‘Kossynier : Sensenträger’ (Warsaw, c. 1830); ‘Ilfracombe, from Lantern Hill’ (Day & Haghe, c. 1830). There also several smaller lithographs including series of seaside views in Devon (Ilfracombe) and East Kent (Ramsgate and evirons, some locally printed.
Four small continental devotional prints, two with moveable flaps, one metallic.
(From the YCBA catalogue record): Mary Leighton, née Parker, 1799-1864 was the third child of Thomas Netherton Parker (1771-1848) and his wife, Sarah. Her parents must have encouraged their children's creative pursuits, as Mary and her elder brother John both became accomplished amateur artists. Their family was close friends of the Ladies of Llangollen, Eleanor Charlotte Barker (1739-1829) and Sarah Ponsonby (1755-1832), two upper-class Irish women who fled their families and established a home together in North Wales, at Plas Newydd, only fifteen miles from the Parker family estate, Sweeney Hall. Correspondence between Sarah Parker and Sarah Ponsonby, currently in the Denbighshire Record Office archives, reveals that Mary occasionally sent the ladies her drawings, many of which record the grounds of Plas Newydd and the surrounding countryside. The subjects of Mary's drawings also include prominent Grand Tour sites, satirical treatments of contemporary fashions, and thoughtful portraits of friends and family. Notably, the only portrait from life of the Ladies of Llangollen is by Mary's hand. Mary remained an active amateur artist following her 1832 marriage to Baldwin Leighton, 7th Baronet (1805-1871), of Loton Hall. Together they had six children, who Mary actively encouraged in drawing and painting. 

Copy number 5 of 111 copies only printed for Les Cent Une, Société de femmes bibliophiles, with two original pencil drawings and a suite of proof plates. All copies were printed on paper watermarked ‘Les Cent Une’ and this is a tirage de tête copy printed for member, Celeste Pigasse. The text is after the 1556 French edition by André Jaulme (complete with authentic contractions) while the superb visual interpretations by Mariette Lydis include two of her characteristic decorated maps (both are signed). This is one of the early publications for the women’s book collecting club founded in Paris by the Princesse Schakhowskoy in 1926 as a direct riposte to ‘Les Cent’ — a bibliophile circle which then included no women among its members. Les Cent Une issued editions limited to the 101 members only and a handful of collaborators, usually no more than once a year, and the club is still in existence. Celeste Pigasse (née Crouzat) was a founder member and served as the club’s general secretary in its formative years (her husband founded the publishing house Librairie des Champs-Élysées ‘LCE’ whose Le Masque imprint published popular crime and detective fiction, including the French editions of Agatha Christie). Carteret IV, 322.

Smith’s Wealth of Nations had first appeared in French in 1778-9 in an anonymous translation, followed by a second by Jean-Louis Blavet in 1781. Roucher’s translation first appeared in four volumes in 1790-1. Jean-Antoine Roucher (1745–94) was a poet from Montpellier, friend and admirer of J.-J. Rousseau. He welcomed the Revolution, but was arrested in the Terror and went to the guillotine. Rochedieu 304; Goldsmiths 14106; Kress B, 1986. K. E. Carpenter, The Dissemination of The Wealth of Nations in French and in France, New York, 2002, pp. 85-87.

A popular Épinal print by the firm first established in 1860 as Pinot & Sagaire, later (1872) just ‘Pinot’. Founded by François Charles Pinot (1817-1874), who had joined the Pellerin firm in 1847 and left in 1860 to found the rival firm, the Imagerie Pinot & Sagaire, or Nouvelle Imagerie d’Epinal.

First edition to contain the engraved frontispiece and title. Marked ‘troisième édition’ on the title-page, this edition, is actually the fourth — following the edition printed privately (in just 25-40 copies) in 1823 and the first two trade editions of 1824. The illustrated edition is considerably rarer (at least in commerce) than the preceding two trade editions (and the true first virtually unobtainable). The plate shows Ourika at the moment of realisation of her isolation and her fate in white European society. Ourika, based on fact, and influenced by Rousseau and Chateaubriand, is the complex story of a black African child, bought (some said rescued) from the slave trade and raised in aristocratic circles in Revolutionary France. It is the first fully developed attempt to portray a black heroine in Europe and the first French novel with a black female narrator. It proved controversial from the start and remains so. On the one hand it has been interpreted as a compassionate account of both racial and female alienation (Duras certainly projects her own experience onto that of her heroine) while on the other it has been described as a sustained act of appropriation and even as an apology for slavery. Whatever is the case, it caused a sensation with the first trade edition of 1824 becoming a bestseller and later editions very widely read in France and further afield (with early translations into English, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish and Danish).

First edition of this serially issued country house book with fine engraved plates by Birrell, Walker, Ellis, Fittler, Heath, among others, after E.F. Burney, Corbould, Dayes, Robert Nixon and others. The engraved title includes a fine vignette of Harrison’s book and print shop in Paternoster Row. It was issued monthly, with four plates per issue at 3 shillings, and printed on ‘real Superfine French Colombier Paper’ (advert in London Gazette, 10-14 October, 1786).
The houses illustrated and described range from the most opulent (including Blenheim palace) to more humble gentry houses. Included are Garrick’s Hampton House, Piozzi’s Thrale Place, William Pitt’s Holwood House, Lady Diana Beauclerk’s Twickenham Meadows, Charles Dashwood’s West Wycombe Park and Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill. The engravings are valuable records of both architectural, landscape and garden details and were widely imitated, not least on contemporary ceramics, while the descriptions contain useful details of architects, garden designs, landscape features such as rivers and lakes, and fine art collections — they are not always entirely complimentary. Upcott p. xxxiv. For Harrison’s bookshop see Raven, ‘Location, Size and Succession: The Book shops of Paternoster Row before 1800’ in The London Book Trade, eds. Myers, Robin; Harris, Michael & Mandelbrote, Giles (London, 2003), pp 89-126.