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First edition with this title and introductory part, a very rare opportunistic edition of Lettres Portuguaises, which found itself onto the Index librorum prohibitorum in 1727. The epistolary novel Lettres Portugaises was one of the publishing sensations of the late seventeenth century and beyond, first published in Paris in 1669, purporting to be the genuine letters between a Portugese nun, Mariana Alcoforado, and the French nobleman, the Marquis de Chamilly. Despite its passionate tone it was not outlawed and indeed it was widely reprinted and set the tone for much of the sentimental and epistolary fiction of the eighteenth century. Though the letters have been proved to be fictional, both parties were real.

This edition, probably clandestine, seems to have been a step too far in the eyes of the censors. Apparently a reissue of the sheets of a 1696 Lyon edition, it was augmented with a 48-page prequel in which the first encounters between Maria and the Marquis in Portugal are recounted. This text was cast as a seduction scene, in which the young nun entertained the Marquis in a private apartment beside her cloister, dressed in a pale blue nightgown adorned with red ribbons. Suppression seems to have been effective and it is unrecorded in public collections, as far as we can tell, besides a single copy in the library at Bourg-en-Bresse. Gay mentions it among the reprints of Lettres Portugaises, citing a copy offered for sale in Paris in 1869. Gay II, 847. Not found in Worldcat.

First edition of an ingenious perpetual calendar, serviceable to the year 2000. and including a folding engraved lunar chart. The preface suggests its utility to ‘l’Homme d’État, le Magistrat, l’Homme de Lettres, le Particulier même’. Duplessis was a map publisher, who also issued a variety of calendars. The advert after the preface offers geographical and historical maps and charts, a large map of France on 175 sheets but also calendar mounted on card with elaborate engraved borders which could be supplied glazed in gilt frames. No US or UK copies in Worldcat.

First edition. In this polemical work the Republican, Constant warned the French people of the consequences of a potential restoration of the monarchy in France. He considers the undesirable consequences of the British Restoration and cites the histories of Clarendon, Hume, Burnet and Ludlow, often giving footnote excerpts in English. It was published shortly before the events of the 18th Brumaire and in the year Constant was also translating Godwin. The manuscript corrections in this copy appear to be editorial. Cioranescu 20698. Worldcat gives US copies at the University of Connecticut, Harvard, Michigan State, Missouri and American Philosophical Society.

First and only edition of this delightful illustrated gift book, describing the four ages of women and depicting them in a series of elegant hand-coloured plates. The dedication printed in civilité type is to the author’s wife (and mother of his children). The final 10 pages comprise a calendar for 1820 (in common with the V&A copy). Worldcat: V&A and Landesbibliothek Mecklenburg only.

Sole edition, this copy signed and inscribed by the artist to Pierre Toreilles. For the Shakespeare 400 year centenary Hugo painted 13 very large panels depicting an imagined journey of Shakespeare from Stratford to Oxford, a path the artist apparently traced on foot. His scenes comprise: Charlecote Park, Fowlers and the Red House of Tysoe, Gentry at Compton Wyngates, Mummers on the Green, Nearing Oxford, Chipping Camden Fair, The Road to Market,The Cotswold Games, Plough and Pasture, Hawking in the Stour Valley and Meon Hill.

‘The French artist Jean Hugo (1894-1984) produced... a set of six canvases he painted for the Shakespeare Festival Exhibition, organised by the ballet critic Richard Buckle in Stratford-upon-Avon. Opened by Prince Phillip on 23 April 1964, the exhibition celebrated the quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth and aimed to portray the world of Tudor England as it may have appeared to Shakespeare... Jean Hugo was born in Paris the great-grandson of the poet and novelist Victor Hugo. He was a painter, illustrator, theatre designer and author, whose artistic career spanned the 20th century and whose work brought him into contact with many of the most influential artistic figures of the 20th century including Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Paul Eluard, Francis Poulenc, Max Jacob, Cecil Beaton and many others.’ (V&A website). Not found in Libraryhub. Worldcat lists copies at National Gallery of Canada and University of Strasbourg only.

First editions of these two separately-issued Acts of Parliament in which the British government sought to legalise the detainment of Napoleon as a prisoner of war on the island of St. Helena.

A rare perspective peepshow depicting a boar hunt in a forest, with horses and dogs. 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 rare perspective peepshow depicting a stag hunt in a forest, with horses and dogs. Among the hunters is one with a rifle, and two with horns. 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 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.

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. Worldcat: Columbia and Bn.

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.

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 its supersized hair-carrying birds dwarfing diminutive dancers this is an inadvertently unsettling piece of Victorian naïve art.

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.

A physionotrace portrait of General Samuel Smith (1752-1839), American Senator and Representative from Maryland and an original member of the Society of the Cincinatti in 1783.

Before the advent of photography the physionotrace was ‘the first system invented to produce multiple copies of a portrait, invented in 1786 by Gilles-Louis Chrétien (1774–1811). In his apparatus a profile cast by a lamp onto a glass plate was traced by an operator using a pointer connected, by a system of levers like a pantograph, to an engraving tool moving over a copper plate. The aquatint and roulette finished engraved intaglio plate, usually circular and small (50 mm), with details of features and costume, could be inked and printed many times’ (Photoconservation.com, sub Printing Processes).

Saint-Mémin (1770-1852) had emigrated from France in 1793 to Switzerland, where he practised as an engraver. Crossing the Atlantic to Canada and then the United States, he established a portrait business in New York with his compatriot Thomas Bluget de Valdenuit (who initially produced the drawings for Saint-Mémin to engrave). When Valdenuit returned to Paris, Saint-Mémin adopted an itinerant practice all over the East Coast states, working variously at Philadelphia, Richmond, Charleston and Burlington. He too returned to France in 1814, having destroyed his drawing apparatus in a symbolic end to a prolific artistic enterprise which produced more than a thousand different portraits of significant figures in American society, including Washington, Revere and Jefferson. An original portrait, together with the copper plate and twelve impressions cost $25 for gentlemen, $35 for ladies, presumably because of the more elaborate details of hair, though many male sitters (including Smith) sported elaborate braids.

A popular guide to attracting a [female] lover, providing advice on preparation, likely meeting places and the initial interactions. There are sample dialogues between the two parties, leading to the proffering (and acceptance) of an engagement ring, followed by a formulary of advice for inviting family and friends to a wedding. Success is apparently the only outcome.
It is not certain where or by who this was printed. Hélot, La Bibliothèque bleue en Normandie, 1928, N°137 suggests the imprint is an ‘Adresse fantaisiste énigmatique, employée par P. Chalopin, le bois de la page 3 est bein celui ayant appartenu à cet imprimeur, avec brisure de 4 mm à gauche dans le filet de l'encadrement’. Another account decodes the anagrams ‘‎Lelis, Goderfe, rue de Nemenya’ to reveal Sillé [le-Guillaume, near Le Mans] and the printer Déforge in the rue de Mayenne (J.-P. Epinal, ‘Une famille de libraires à Sillé-le-Guillaume: les Déforge (1771-1846)’, La Province du Maine, 1976/1, p. 44-68).