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First edition. An elegant anonymous satire on fashionable dress for women, directed especially against the painful pursuit of an artificial figure: ‘Come here, you two girls, that look full in my face, / And you that so often are turning your back [the Graces], / Put on these cork rumps, and then tighten your stays / ‘Till your hips, and your ribs, and the strings themselves crack. / Can ye speak? can ye breathe? - Not a word - Then ‘twill do. / You have often dress’d me, and for once I’ll dress you.’ Jackson, p. 59.

In a handsome Georgian binding. Among the more recent ‘Remarkable Events’: ‘George III. went to St. Paul’s to return thanks for his recovery from his alarming illness, April 23 1789.’ Goldsmith miniature almanacks for the years 1681-1840 are listed in Welsh 3090-3094. ESTC: BL and University of Kansas of this issue.

Probably the first edition in French—one of several issues of the same year with the same pagination but differing title ornaments. First published in 1740 as The Chronicle of the Kings of England under the pseudonym of Nathan Ben Saddi, Dodsley here displayed his egalitarian leanings with this rewriting of English history in the style of the King James Version of the Old Testament Pentateuch. The imprint is false and it is unlikely that the French editions were actually printed in London. In this issue the engraved vignette on the title-page is a frame with a pedestal upon which are a spear, a shield, laurel wreaths and an owl, there are several variants, as enumerated in the ESTC. Rochedieu, p. 88 (noting issues with both Londres and Amsterdam imprints).

First edition of this very pretty and rare almanac-style guide to the principle walks and attractions in the Paris region, with plates including the Champs Elysées, the Chateaux de Vincennes and Malmaion and Rousseau’s garden at Ermenonville. Outside continental Europe, Worldcat lists only the Princeton, UCLA and Canadian Centre for Architecture (Montreal) copies.

First edition. Jointly authored with Robida, who also provided the illustrations, Contes pour les Bibliophiles contains Uzanne’s prescient essay ‘La Fin des livres’. This remarkable text has been eagerly discussed by commentators on the interface between traditional and electronic book. Like many contempories Uzanne and Robida had been enthralled by inventions such as Edison’s phonograph and Ader’s ‘théatrophone’ and they predicted fundamental shifts in the consumption of literature in their wake. ‘La Fin des livres’ describes (and illustrates) wonderful devices for the consumption of audiobooks in the home and in public places, suggesting that they would become as straightforward as turning on a tap. The library of the future would in turn become a roomful of recorded cylinders, and publishers would be required to register the voices of their authors by way of copyright.

What would such a democratization of the word do to the printed book? Uzanne’s response was to look at current production of books and insist that books would not die provided they remained objects of beauty and desire worthy of the attention of bibliophiles. The wonderful cover illustrations and typography are by George Auriol, member of the Chat Noir circle and friend of Erik Satie.

Sole edition. ‘And Enoch walked with God. Gen. V. 24.’ Apparently by an anonymous follower of the evangelical Church of England preacher, William Romaine — a spiritual meditation occasioned by a daily walk — a trope clearly derived from Romaine’s spiritual classic The Walk of Faith (1771), a work recommended in a postscript here: ‘Reader, if the perusal of this letter has been profitable unto you, and you desire to be further instructed how to live by Faith, and walk humbly and happily with your God, ---- I would recommend to you a Treatise of the Life of Faith, and one of the Walk of Faith; both by the Rev. Romaine Rector of St. Ann Blackfriars...’

First and only edition, issued the year after the Easter Rising, showing hundreds of Dublin businesses seeking exports all over the world. Among the many listings and advertisements for brewers, distillers, foundries, printers, publishers, linen manufacturers, shipyards, engineers and so on, are found two one-third page adverts for the Yeats sisters’ Cuala Industries and the Dun Emer Guild. The two firms had been founded under the Dun Emer name by Elizabeth and Lily Yeats in 1902 producing Arts and Crafts printing, embroidery, rugs and tapestry, before dividing in 1904. The Cuala advert shows the Yeats’s Churchtown bungalow and reads: ‘Embroidery—Lily Yeats. Hand Press—Elizabeth C. Yeats. Editor of the Press—W.B. Yeats.’ The Dun Emer advert shows a woman working at a loom and offers ‘Hand-woven Carpets & Tapestries, Embroideries, Enamels, Bookbinding’.

There are also historical and topographical accounts of the city. This was the first appearance of the Dublin Year Book and it was apparently not reprinted. Scarce. Worldcat lists US copies at NYPL, Illinois, Kansas, Chapel Hill and South Carolina. We also find copies at the University of Cork, UCD, LSE and BL.

A very neatly presented elementary project on leather production and its use in craft bookbinding, with useful samples illustrating the different characters and textures of goat, sheep and calf, and the nature of morocco. There are also colour samples and some examples of elementary lettering and tooling (presumably by the author) who was probably a student at a British technical college. There are two samples of eighteenth century book covers and a nice drawing of the binding of the seventh century Stoneyhurst/St Cuthbert Gospel, the earliest intact European bookbinding.

An elaborate antiquarian collection containing 19 large double-page armorials, apparently of the sixteenth century of the major families of Belgium, including Beaufort, Berghes, Egmont, Hornes, Lalain, Luzembourg, St. Aldegond, and including a number of members of the Order of the Golden Fleece. Each of these armorials bears detailed contemporary genealogies to their versos. These have been conserved by the British antiquary David Powell (?1772-1848) with other early genealogical material, his own notes and four large drawings of related stained glass, including a large window from the church of Notre Dame du Sablon (Brussels) and another in the hands of ‘Mr Whatson an eminent glazier Hanway Yard Oxford Street’ in 1816.

Born in Tottenham, Powell became a Lieutenant in the 14th Light Dragoons; he left a manuscript account of his 1794 experiences in Cork, Flanders and Brabant. He later entered Magdalen College, Oxford, receiving a B.C.L. in June 1805. He spent much of the rest of his life making heraldic and genealogical collections, and touring England and Wales to make watercolour sketches of churches and manor houses in over forty counties. He died in 1848, and his library was sold by Puttick & Simpson over three days. Many of Powell's manuscripts are now in the British Library.

First edition in English, very rare, of this celebrated treatise on inventions and origins, including accounts of the invention of printing, theatre, mathematics, medicine, magic, religion, law, government (as well as prostitution and warm baths). First published in Latin in 1499 (Venice) and augmented in 1521, it digested a huge mass of classical, biblical and contemporary learning and became a Renaissance bestseller. As many as 30 Latin editions alone appeared before the author’s death in 1555. The English translation, an abridgement by Thomas Langley, did not appear until 1546, by which time the Urbino-born Polydore had been resident in England for several decades. A diplomat, scholar and historian, Vergil counted Desiderius Erasmus, Thomas More, Cuthbert Tunstall, Thomas Linacre and Baldessare Castiglione among his acquaintances and correspondents.

Issued no less than three times in 1546, this English edition is remarkably rare. We can find only this copy at auction in the last 50 years. The work is divided into eight books, from which Langley makes succinct abridgements, of which a selection of chapter headings gives a flavour:

I. 9. ‘The begynnyng of Tragedies, Comedies, Satyres, and newe Comedies; 11. ‘Who founde Musyke’; 12. ‘Who found Musicall instruments’; 14. ‘Astrologie’; 15. ‘Who fonde Geometrie, Artihmetike’; 16. ‘Physike’; 17. ‘The inventours of herbes medicinable’; 18. ‘The beginnyng of Magike’; 19. ‘Two kyndes of divination’.

II. 1. ‘The originall of lawes’; 2. ‘Who ordeyned the first gouvernaunces’; 6. ‘Who set furth books fyrst, or made a library, Printyng, paper, parchement, arte of memory’ (which includes the observation: ’Truely the com[m]odite of liberaries is right profitable & necessary, but in co[m]parison of the crafte of printyng it is nothyng, both because one ma[n] may printe more in one day, then many men in many years could wryte: And also it preserveth both Greke & Latine auctours fro the dau[n]ger of corruption. It was found in Germany at Mogunce [Mainz] by one J. Guthenbergus a knight, he found moreover the Inke by his devise that printers used...)’

Among other entries we find treatments of: war, Olympiades, plays, metals, coins, painting, ‘wyne, oyle, honye, chese, and strange trees broughte into Italy’, labyrinths, theatres, prostitution and brothels, and Christian and Moslem origins and customs.

Provenance: Sotheby’s, June 14th, 1965, lot 231 (Traylen, £55); Blackwell, Centenary Catalogue, 1979, item 27, £450; private collection. STC 24654. STC lists two other printings of the same year: 24655 (another edition, reset, with colophon dated 16 April) and 24656 (another issue, portions reset, with both title and colophon dated 16 April). In an article of 1888, John Ferguson suggested that these 16 April editions/issues preceded the 25 January edition, having old style dates in their imprints, but this sequence was not adopted by the editors of STC; John Ferguson, ‘Bibliographical Notes on the English Translation of Polydore Vergil’s work, De Inventoribus Rerum’, 1888, pp. 17 et seq.

First edition.

– Je m’appelle Frank T… et je suis un alcoolique.
– Je m’appelle Elizabeth F… et je suis une alcoolique.

The work which was instrumental in establishing Alcoholics Anonymous in France. A note following the title reads: ‘Les personnes quie seraient intéressées par les “Alcooliques anonymes” peuvent s’addresser aux ALCOOLIQUES ANONYMES, groupe des Paris, 65, quai d’Orsay’ [the Amercian Church in Paris, still a meeting point for the organisation].

First edition of this wonderfully-illustrated guide to Japanese life, with chapters on storytelling, the theatre, wrestling, geishas, fortune telling, firemen and jinrikisha drivers.

First edition with the brilliant illustrations by Léon Lebègue, this copy for composer Monsieur [Stéphane] Raoul Pugno. First published in 1860, this is one of classic accounts of the perils of bibliomania, here with a witty series of illustrations (in two states) by Lebègue.

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.

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.

First edition, known otherwise only from the Bibliothèque nationale copy, of this tiny promotional pamphlet for the notorious (yet successful) marriage agent in imperial Paris. It is a remarkable little testimony to post-revolutionary upheaval and its effects on social relations. Marriage-broker Villiaume is credited as the pioneer in France of advertising for partners in the petites affiches of newspapers. He had apparently hit upon the idea while imprisoned in the mental asylum for his part in an assassination attempt against Napoleon: he is reported to have made enquiries into the social situation of all the male inmates (which naturally at this date included numerous members of the old aristocracy) and then did the same among their female counterparts in the women’s asylum. On his release he founded the Agence Générale et Centrale pour Pais et l’Empire on the Rue Neuve-Saint-Eustache and began a Parisian craze for marriage brokering.

Evidently prepared to turn his hand to any promising enterprise this pocket guide advertises his services as a broker not just for marriages, but of various other situations and he takes the opportunity to defend himself against his many detractors and to advertise the sale of his neighbours’ second-hand furniture.

‘Founder of the most widely known matrimonial agency in postrevolutionary France, Claude Villiaume proved his talents as an enterprising ad man who exploited the uniquely commercial format of the Parisian Petites affiches to establish a virtual monopoly on the business under the Empire. Offering to serve as a conduit for men and women who pursued love anonymously in the Petites affiches, he skillfully marketed his “marriages by the classifieds” to lonely, uprooted individuals throughout imperial France. Villiaume pitched his unions as part of a new commercial and social world of movement in Paris. He sought to facilitate the circulation of capital and people by forging family alliances and love matches across multiple social and geographic borders. By linking marital choice and courtship to the vagaries of consumer capitalism, the agent transformed marriage into a form of commercial exchange associated with the new urban values of abundance, pleasure, and social mobility’ (abstract from Andrea Mansker, ‘Marriages by the Petites Affiches: Advertising Love, Marital Choice, and Commercial Matchmaking in Napoléon's Paris’, French Historical Studies (2018) 41 (1): 1-31).

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.

First edition, a satirical play on the Convulsionnaires (’les quakres françois’) and the Jansensists who were seen to have encouraged them with their belief in miracles. The tomb of the Jansenist M. de Pâris in the Paris churchyard of Saint Médard had become the location for an outbreak of popular devotion and miracleworking, with miraculous cures and speaking in tongues regularly reported. It became a cause célèbre, and the authorities were forced to close the churchyard. The episode spawned a large literature: favourable, unfavourable and satirical. Bougeant’s play is firmly in the last category and comes complete with a satirical woodcut of a contortionary dancer as ‘Instructeur des acteurs du Tombeau de M. de Paris’. ‘The most famous of the Convulsionnaires was Father Bescherand, known for his ‘sautes-de-carpe’, wild carp-like leaps performed in spite of a famously bad limp. In Les Quakres françois ... Bougeant satirizes Father Bescherand as a complex plot unfolds to grace this virtuosic Convulsionary with a troupe of men and women paid to jump and leap with him... (Gotman, Choreomania: Dance and Disorder, 2018, p. 102). Cioranescu 13200.