Search

First edition, rare, of this collection of children’s songs. Ludovica Brentano, later baroness Desbordes (1787-1854), affectionately known as Lulu, was grand daughter of Sophie von La Roche (the first widely known German female novelist) and she became patron of the Grimm brothers; contributing two tales to their Kinder- und Hausmärchen. Worldcat: NYPL and Harvard in US, BL in UK.

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’.

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).

First edition of the official report of Curzon’s administration of Indian home affairs during his period as Viceroy. Curzon’s office was contentious and was concluded following a bitter feud with Kitchener. His belief in traditional sovereignty was frequently at odds with emergent Indian nationalism but many of his achievements have been long lasting, especially in the field of law, education and cultural heritage. Nearly 100 pages of the Home Department report are devoted to his judicial reforms with a further hundred concern policing and penal policies. His work reforming the University system is recounted in detail and there are interesting accounts of the merger between the Calcutta City Library and the Imperial Library to form what became the Indian National Library. Medical, sanitary and plague issues also occupy a full part.

This is one of several official reports on aspects of Curzon’s administration, subtitled: Public Works; Department of Commerce and Industry; Department of Revenue and Agriculture and Railway Board. All are very scarce. COPAC and OCLC between them list copies of the Home Department report at Bodley and Syracuse only.

First edition of this extraordinary treatise on the status of eunuchs in society, according to civil and canon law. Largely based on classical sources, history and (most interestingly) anecdotal evidence from the Orient, Ancillon considers the reasons for the phenomenon (including slavery, household, employment or punishment for sexual misdemeanour). The major contention is that while civil law permits a eunuch to marry, canon law should forbid it (as it did) on the grounds that a marriage could not be consummated. Along the way Ancillon recounts numerous anecdotes of famous eunuchs, notably Abelard, castrated at the instigation of Heloise’s family.

The book was later translated into English by Robert Samber as part of Edmund Curll’s Eunuchism display’d (1718).

This copy of Traité des Eunuques is one of at least two issues of the same year with slightly different paginations and title ornaments. The ‘Epitre dedicatoire’ is signed: ‘C. d’Ollincan’ an anagram of the author’s real name. Gay III, 1239.

First edition, Charles Wesley’s verse epistle to his brother John, written during the crisis of the Methodism in the 1750s on the subject of the movement’s separation from the Church of England. For the the Methodist conference of 1755 John had prepared a paper entitled, Ought we to separate from the Church of England? in which he urged that, ‘whether or not it was lawful, separation was not expedient, believing that as a result Methodism would dwindle into an ineffective sect’ (Oxford DNB).

First edition. A humorous skit on English lawyers. ‘“The Pleader’s Guide” is the production of Mr. Anstey, a son of the celebrated author of the Bath Guide. From the merit of this volume, we might almost be tempted to believe that wit his hereditary. The same wit, the same humour, the same playful satire, that adorn the Bath Guide are to be found here. To render the jargon of the law at all bearable in verse, seems at first impossible, but Mr. Anstey has proved the fallacy of such an opinion. The man who can read the Pleader’s Guide without laughing, must be in possession of the most inflexible muscles, or a more than common share of stupidity’ (Poetical Register). Jackson, p. 211.

First edition of this collection of Whig satires on the inactivity of the Tory ministry. At least Jekyll and perhaps the whole work is by Richardson. The ‘Extracts’ purportedly come from an album from Mr. Steele’s house at Streatham, a noted Tory haunt where ‘each sabbath was spent in debate;... dispatches were dispatched without number, and without end, until Ministers had accomplished their own wise purposes... and, to use an appropriate line of the late Dr Johnson; “Had killed the yet unanimated young”’.

There were three further editions and a Dublin reprint in 1788-9, but the first edition is uncommon. Jackson, p. 139.

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.

Second edition, originally published in 1749 in quarto. The print run for both editions was 750 copies (Maslen & Lancaster, Bowyer Ledgers 3792).

West’s Pindar is his most important literary achievement, and was widely admired; ‘the product of great labour and great abilities’ (Johnson). ‘While the translation itself is conventionally elegant, West’s notes mark a breakthrough in the reading of the odes in terms of their historical occasion, and the dissertation, praised by Gibbon, offers a rare eighteenth-century appreciation of the cultural and political significance of sport’ (Oxford DNB).

Sole edition. In the Monthly Review’s opinion: ‘A fruitless attempt to catch the Eel of Wit by the tail.’ With allusions to Wilkes, Garrick, and Catherine the Great, among others. Jackson, p. 56.

First edition: a rare poem on the behaviour and cultivation of bees, copiously and diversely annotated with references to bees in Classical literature; crocodile anatomy; Jesuit activity in South America, etc. Murphy was a close friend of Samuel Johnson, also to the Thrales, to whose sixth child, Susanna Arabella, he dedicates the present work. British Bee Books 157. ESTC locates 9 copies, of which only three in America (Library Company of Philadelphia, Minnesota, Yale).

Scarce first edition, dedicated ‘to the Memory of Samuel Johnson... by a Friend...’ Murphy (1727–1805) was a successful Irish actor and dramatist, who introduced Johnson to Mrs Thrale. He here pays tribute to Johnson’s two great imitations of Juvenal, London and The Vanity of Human Wishes. Jackson, p. 170.

First edition, an anonymous satire on contemporary political figures, notably William Pitt. ‘This satire, wrote in the manner of Swift, is not destitute of merit. The versification is loose, and many of the lines hobble; but some thoughts are manly, just, and sarcastic’ (Critical Review). A second edition followed in the same year.

First edition of this extensive global dictionary of conflict, covering both ancient and modern history. Though the longest entries tend to be for battles involving France, there are good entries for many other conflicts. Notable are: Agincourt, Bannockburn, Barnet, Belle-Isle, Bosworth, Siege of Calais, Calcutta, Crécy, Culloden, Dunes, Dunkirk, Edinburgh, Gènes, Gibraltar, Harlem, Hastings, Inverness, Jerusalem (many), Lerida, Londonderry, Madras, Marlborough, Martinique, Messina (numerous), Minden, Naseby, Orleans, Paris, Poitiers, Pondicherry and Rome (many). The American continent is represented by entries for: Cartagena de Indias (1741), Choueugen [Oswego], (1756), Havana (1762), Louisbourg (1745 and 1758), Quebec (1759), Rio (1711), Tumbes (and the conquest of Peru). The first volume concludes with an alphabetical index of military leaders.

First edition of the first book of poetry by the great Oriental scholar. ‘The success in 1772 of Poems, Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Languages owed much to the fashionable craze for things oriental; according to Elizabeth Montagu, “The descriptions are so fine, & all the objects so brilliant, that the sense aches at them!” As a poet Jones blended philosophical allegory and dramatic narrative into the genre of the oriental verse tale, but as a scholar he created, through his concern for accuracy of translation and comparative linguistic method, a demand for genuine Eastern products while significantly adjusting racial and political stereotypes... Two essays which Jones included in this volume are highly significant in terms of the history of criticism, as they install the lyric at the centre of poetry. “On the poetry of the Eastern nations” establishes Jones as a major precursor of the Romantics’ (Oxford DNB). Also included is ‘Caissa, or, the Game of Chess, a Poem. Written in the Year 1763.’ The poem, in heroic couplets, tells the story of Caïssa, who initially repels the advances of the god of war, Mars. Spurned, Mars seeks the aid of the god Euphron (Jones’s invention), brother of Venus, who creates the game of chess as a gift for Mars to win Caïssa’s favour. Jackson, p, 15.

Sole edition, privately printed, of this collection of a group of letters between the famous beauty and literary patron and the Gordon family accountant. Despite Jane Gordon’s early success in society at Edinburgh and London (she was an important early patron of Burns), her estrangement from her husband 1805 brought financial distress. Forced to live in hotel rooms in London she was in constant dispute with her husband over money. These rather pitiful letters, berating her husband for his excesses and pleading for money, were published here for the first time, prefixed by an attractive photographic reproduction of the portrait of the Duchess by Reynolds. OCLC: no US copies.

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

An eighteenth-century account book of the guild of hatmakers in the city of Antwerp, covering nearly 70 years. The Antwerp hatmakers were an important craft organization with a well-regulated structure. Their accounts were overseen by aldermen, each serving for several years, who recorded income (usually in the the form of entry fines for new members) and expenditure (usually payment for the guilds officials). One of the major expenditures was the payment of the ‘proefmeesters’ who exercised quality control by examining the products of prospective entrants before admitting them to membership.

The accounts provide a detailed record of the names of entrants to the guild and of guild officials. They also provide much incidental detail of the position of the craft within the regional economy, with frequent expenditures recording contact with the neighbouring towns of Brussels, Mechelen and Bruges.