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First edition, one of 500 copies. A copiously-illustrated homage to the Parisian landmark. An English translation appears at the end, concluding: ‘O Moulin Rouge! Thou dost dominate Paris, France, the world. Thy sails turn forever, for the breeze that moves them is the breath of the men who come to admire thee and to adore thee, Mill of Voluptuousness, Tower of Delight, Ark of Alliance, Vessel of Caresses, Star of the Evening, House of Pleasant Weariness, Palace of Languidness, Mystic Rose also, of which each petal is a moving sail capped by a bonnet, O Carnal Vase held towards all men who approach unto love....’ You get the idea.

First edition: a survey of the city in 1860 (its buildings and infrastructure, ),with long sections on the Asile impérial de Vincennes, founded in 1855 for convalescent workers, the Maison Eugène-Napoléon, a school for poor girls set up in 1858, and the history of Paris’s theatres after Napoleon limited the number of theatres in the city to twelve, then eight.
Vicaire V, 1021.

First edition, by the journalist and champion of political reform, William Carpenter (1794–1874). ‘The following little work pretends not to the character of a history; but it will be found to embody, in consecutive order, the leading events of the late glorious revolution in France, derived from the most authentic sources, and interspersed with such remarks and reflections as they naturally call forth’ (Preface).

An original lease granted by George II to Sir Matthew Decker of lands once part of the royal park of Richmond at Richmond Green, formerly known as the Bakehouse. Sir Charles Hedges (died 1714), Secretary of State to Queen Anne had built a fine house here, which was enlarged by Decker (1679-1749), a wealthy Dutch merchant, who settled in London in 1702, becoming and MP and director of the East India Company. He created a celebrated garden on this land, widely commented on by contemporaries and the site of the first successful cultivation of the pineapple in Britain.

This little pocket book has been densely filled with diary notes by a young girl or young woman, presumably one Flora Keene. She copies out several hymns at the opening, and then completes every day of her diary, with dense and minute notes, now very hard to read, mainly noting family comings and goings. The frontispiece by John Leech entitled ‘Volunteer Movement — Jones & Family go under Canvas’ is a satire on the British volunteer rifle corps, formed in 1859 as a response to public fears of a French invasion. There is also a series of delightful vignettes by Tenniel on Shakespearean quotations.

A rather astonishing survival: the signal book of the Redoutable, a French ship captured and burnt by the British ship Prince under captain Joseph Peyton and vice admiral Thomas Broderick at the Battle of Lagos. On the 18 August 1759, the Rédoutable, as part of a French fleet intended for an invasion of Great Britain, was engaged by Peyton’s Prince off the Portuguese coast, an action that became known and the Battle of Lagos. The contemporary cover annotation on this signal and logbook dramatically explains both its provenance and condition: ‘Taken from the Rédoutable — burnt by the Prince Capt. Jos. Peyton Com. Vice Adm. Broderick’s was onboard / on the Coast of Portugal - in Augt. 1759’.

In 1759, during the Seven Years War, the ship was part of the fleet assembled at Toulon under French Admiral de la Clue which was destined to reinforce the main French fleet at Brest for the planned invasions of Great Britain. The signal book contains current orders and signals governing the fleet, which consisted of the Oriflamme, Lion, Centaure, Fantasque, Triton, Souverain, Ocean, Guerrier, Temeraire, Fier and Modeste. It details six ordres de marche or sailing formations, six ordres de bataille and one ordre de retraite, in each case a flag being illustrated to denote the formation to be adopted by the twelve ships of the fleet. These must have been copied up before, or at the time of embarkation, and they are followed by Rédoutable’s sailing specifications, with 30 different sails and two tenders. There is a also a log for August 1759, covering the days between the 4th and 14th, including the record on the order on the 8th to pursue a Neapolitan craft ‘venant de Londres chargé de bèjout [bijoux?] pour le comte des anglais’. From Tuesday 14th August, the log is blank, with the following pages ruled but never completed.

Admiral Joseph Peyton (1725–1804) was to become commander of the Mediterranean fleet and saw further service in the Battles of Ushant and Cape St Vincent. The manuscript has remained in the Peyton family by descent.

Second edition in English (after the first, Edinburgh and Perth, 1792) abridged and translated from Niebuhr’s Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien und andern umliegenden Laendern (1774) and volume two from Niebuhr’s Beschreibung von Arabien (1772). It recounts Niebuhr’s travels in the Middle East, Egypt, Persia, India and Arabia, the first scientific expedition to this area which was subsidised by the Danish king. The plates depict: An Arab on horseback; Dancing girls in Egypt; Procession at an Egyptian marriage; The way to Mount Sinai; Mount Sinai and the Convent of St. Catherine; Dress of the women in the back parts of Yemen and Scene in Arabia Petrea. Howgego, to 1800, N24

This manuscript provides a chronology of English history in the form of a list of ennoblements (’Creations’) made in all the reigns from William the Conqueror to Queen Elizabeth I. It was probably written up in the final years of Elizabeth’s reign, with some small later additions at the end, adding three ennoblements made in 1597-8. Each name in the roll is accompanied by a short paragraph, sometimes with some additional biographical detail, followed by an abbreviated account of their arms, usually in italic script. This follows the pattern of numerous other manuscript lists of creations, some of which are illustrated with coats of arms. In this unillustrated version each device is instead described in the abbreviated technical terms essential for all students of heraldry and such knowledge formed the background of historical knowledge for all educated gentlemen of the Elizabethan age.

At the head of each reign a large title in italic script additionally gives a heraldic description of each monarch’s arms. Henry VII’s, for example are described as ‘Fraunce et Angli’ quaterly / Dragon, volante de ore / Grayhounde de Ar’ collere d’or’. The creations themselves provide a detailed list of the most powerful members of society in every reign. They are especially interesting in the Tudor period, when creations of title provided the background of powerbroking between the court and families rising in influence through patronage and economic success. For Henry VIII’s reign we find, among others, the ennoblement of Thomas Boleyn or ‘Bullen’ (father of Anne Boleyn); Thomas Cromwell; Arthur, illegitimate son of Edward IV, and William Parr (brother of Catherine Parr). For the reign of Edward VI we find, Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset (brother of Jane Seymour) and William Parr (now as Earl of Essex), and for Elizabeth, Robert Dudley and William Cecil.

Two final completed leaves contain a long note on Richard, Earl of Arundel, a list of ‘The nobilite of Englande accordinge to their Creaciones’ [a list of Elizabethan nobility]

Provenance: Sotheran’s, Catalogue of Ancient and Modern Books, 5 (1852), number 348, 12 shillings; Sir Charles George Young (1795–1869) ex dono T. R. Weeton; John Paul Rylands FSA, 1874; Harry Rylands [1847-1922]; J. Lambarde, 1928; Cecil Humphery Smith; Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Research, Canterbury.

Caroline Naudet (1775-1839), one of the very few female caricaturists of her era, she was the daughter of the caricaturist Thomas-Charles Naudet. She is known as the artist of some 25 separate satirical prints c. 1817-1823. The plate depicts an older well-dressed lady sitting for an urbane looking artist. The caption reads:

‘Une dame de qualite faisant faire son portrait s'efforcait de se retrecir la bouche l'artiste s'en appercut et lui dit pour peu que madame le veuille je n'en ferait pas du tout’ (A lady of quality having her portrait done was trying to narrow her mouth. The artist noticed this and said to her, if Madam would like it, I won’t paint it at all). Benezit III, 347.

A large and splendid binding - of one of the notorious forgeries created by Théodore Hagué (1822-1891) one of a considerable number purporting to have been made for Henri II and his mistress, Diane de Poitiers. Hagué (1822-1891) had worked in London for Zaehnsdorf but was living in France in the 1860s when he began creating pastiche bindings and then outright forgeries, offering them for sale first in 1862. It was not until 1875 when examples found their way to London via Bernard Quaritch, who had entered into correspondence with a certain M. Caulin who was offering choice renaissance books, many apparently formerly belonging to a lost collection of Henri II and Diane de Poitiers. Quaritch sold the books almost exclusively to the British collector John Blacker. ‘Needless to say, the ordeal ended well for no one involved: by 1888, John Blacker had spent approximately thirteen years and £36,000 (£3.4 million by modern reckoning) collecting forged bindings, Bernard Quaritch was forced to scramble to cover his losses and hopefully his involvement in the whole charade, and Hagué dropped dead suddenly in 1891. Blacker’s collection was sold at Sotheby’s for £1,907 16s 6d in 1897, which translates to a little over £205,000 in 2017. Henry Folger, who began his collecting in 1883 (when John Blacker was deeply invested in purchasing Caulin/Hague’s forged bindings), kept a copy of the 1897 catalog, which features multiple full-color images made with a combination of letterpress and chromolithography, rare (and expensive) for an auction catalog at the time’ (Elizabeth DeBold, Under Cover: forged Bindings on Display at the Folger, Folger Library Blog, July 19, 2018).

Blacker’s sale included no less than nineteen books purporting to have been made for Henri II and Diane de Poitiers. This one, being a folio, has an especially expansive ‘Grolerieresque’ strapwork designs in black, white and gilt, a scheme continued in colours on the fully decorated gilt and gauffred edges. The design incorporates variations of both their monograms and devices, including Diane’s crescent moon devices (evoking Diane the Huntress, goddess of the moon, and her reputed iridescent beauty) and the famously ambiguous entwined ‘H’ and ‘D’ (the latter actually a ‘C’ for Henri’s Queen, Catherine, but easily readable as ‘D’ for Diana). Sotheby’s, Catalogue of a remarkable Collection of Books in magnificent modern Bindings, formed by an Amateur (recently deceased) (11 Nov. 1897), lot 15. Mirjam Foot, ‘Double Agent: M. Caulin and M. Hagué,’ Book Collector, Special Edition for the 150th Anniversary of Bernard Quaritch (1997), pp. 136-150. Adams B102; Von Gültlingen, Mareschal 14.

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.

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 Barbier 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 all printed as gravures by Manzi, Joyant and Cie. 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 transcribe it. 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. The text had appeared in English in an edition of 1907 (New York and London, Funk and Wagnalls) together with versions of Engueda-Work’s illustrations.

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 early Enlightenment taste in houses and gardens of both town and country 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 was 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.