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A interesting and unique copy of this monumental pictorial record of European coins and medals struck in the Napoleonic era, including many commemorative medals of battles and truces. A printed book, with a London imprint, with portions (including title) in manuscript copy, and plates dissected, partly copied in manuscript and re-arranged. It is difficult to interpret the unusual hybrid form here, but it would appear to be a contemporary collector or curator’s production allowing the illustrations to be consulted alongside their descriptions in the text. The plates in the printed edition presented the coins and medals in a different order to the text, with corresponding numbers linking the illustrations, but turning from text to plate may have been a tiresome business. The fact that the titles, preliminary text and indexes are given as manuscript copies is less easy to explain, though at least one of the manuscripts indexes is more comprehensive than that of the printed edition. Many of the illustrations are marked with a small flower shaped inkstamp, perhaps also a collector’s demarcation.

Millin de Grandmaison (1759-1818) had been curator of the Cabinet des médailles et antiques of the former French royal library but died before this survey could be published. The manuscript was passed to the British-born James Millingen, formerly of the French mint, later an antiquary and dealer, who collated it and published it in London in both French and English versions. The imprints are faithfully copied in manuscript in our version, but it is likely a French rather than a British production.

Sole edition, a very rare illustrated record of British ships, commercial and naval, by ‘A Lady’, probably an amateur lithographer and the ‘T.I. Walker’ whose name appears on some of the plates (which were all printed by C. Hullmandel). Worldcat: State Library NSW and Canadian War Museum only. No copies located in British libraries. Walker not mentioned by Twyman in Early Lithographed Books.

A collection of finely-executed miniatures reproducing in colour sixteenth-century printer’s ornaments and initials: 39 selected initials, three tailpieces, one headpiece and one printer’s device (Giunta, dated on verso 1567). Some are signed, minutely, ‘A. Baudon’ who we have been unable to trace. The artist has copied, in remarkable detail, these wood and metalcut ornaments, reproducing in many cases the speckled backgrounds typical of punched or ‘criblé’ designs.

A set of blank ornamental borders designed for use by the convent girls of the monastery of the order of the Visitation at Ornans in Eastern France. Probably destined for use as models for notecards and letters, as suggested by the contemporary tracings. A wonderful example of contemporary decorative arts in a convent environment these watercolours are elegantly ornate, incorporating foliage, flowers, vines, swags and birds. The convent at Ornans had been founded in the early seventeenth century and, after the Revolution, refounded as a religious school in 1839 for girls. The Ordre de la Visitation de Sainte-Marie, or ‘Visitandines’ had existed also from the early seventeenth century, founded as an active order for the visitation of the sick.

First edition of this rare comic and satirical novel, partly set in England in the years of the French Revolutionary Wars, culminating in the fall of Bonaparte. It was later disowned (along with no less than 12 other novels) by its prolific author, who is best known as the author of the Mystères du Palais-Royal (1845-6). Gay I, 879. COPAC: no UK copies; Worldcat: no copies outside continental Europe (Bn and Hungarian Academy of Sciences only).

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.

Sole edition: tales and snippets based on the argot, gossip and jokes of the Porcherons quartier of Paris, at the foot of the slope to Montmartre. It includes the woeful tale of a young clerk and a prostitute and a Catéchisme poissard. It purports to be the work of a washerwoman, ‘Mame Fanchon’. The term ‘Poissarde’ (literally, a fishwife) refers, in general, to coarse and vulgar language and is frequently to be found in chapbooks of the period. Worlcat: Flanders Heritage Library (Antwerp) only.

A superb collection of over 300 spontaneous sketches made in situ in Paris of popular films and entertainments of the 1950s, including the classics Les Vacances de M. Hulot, Buñuel’s El, Le Ballon Rouge and other French films by Renoir and Meliès, Sophia Loren in Neapolitan Carousel, Bob Hope and Lucille Ball in Fancy Pants, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin in Artists and Models and Marilyn Monroe in Bus Stop.

Ryutchi Souzouki (1904-1985) had been a well-regarded and well-connected Montparnasse figure, counting Ernst and Foujita among his friends in the twenties and thirties and frequently exhibiting alongside the surrealists. Born in Yokohama, he spent much of his life in Paris, though his Japanese citizenship prevented him from exhibiting during the war years and probably accounted for his increasing isolation in the post war period. A solitary figure, until his death in poverty, he continued to work, experimenting with automatic drawing and making sketches, such as these, from popular films and entertainments, such as the tableaux vivants of the Casino de Paris, the Folies bergères, conjuring performances and the opera, instantaneously capturing their spirit on scraps of hotel stationery, recycled scraps or cheap spiral-bound notebooks. They are witty, touching and always engaging responses to what he saw in the cinemas and theatres of Paris. Following his death, the contents of his studio, including the many albums he had carefully collated in his final years (like ours) were conserved by his concièrge and dispersed at auction in 1985.

An unusual New Years’ gift from an unnamed compiler ‘for my dearly beloved Isabella Sophia Ochando de la Vanda. January one, 1830’; a manuscript compilation of patriotic verse and pious texts by hymnodist Edmeston, Shepherd, Southey (’The Victory’), Millman, Bowring, Burden, Emmerson, and Carlyle’s ‘Hymn before public worship translated from the Arabic’. Most of the texts are in English but a couple, by the Mechitarian cleric Nerses Clajense, are in Spanish and French respectively.

The two fine watercolours show HMS Victory in battle and a fallen arab horseman.

A delightful example of Japanese art of flower arrangement, ikebana, in the form of 24 ‘Rikka Zu’ (flower arrangements), with an important provenance. The arrangements combine boughs of trees or bamboo. with flowers including chrysanthemums, lotus, lilies, irises, and cherry blossom. The style is deliberately and strikingly asymmetrical, with stems tightly bundled at the foot in keeping with prevailing decorative aesthetics.

The manuscript is dated, on the first extant image, Kansei 4 (1792) July 7th and there is a further inscription to the verso of one fold, now partly obscured by a paper strip (an old reinforcement) but still legible. It reads: ‘The lord Todo Izumino-kami, when his ambassador’s mission at Kyoto had a celebration in Ryokan’ and ‘Ikeno bo’. Ikenobo was the oldest and most important school of ikebana in Japan, founded at Kyoto in the fifteenth century, while the Todo clan were an ancient Samurai family with origins in the sixteenth century. The manuscript may be considerably older than the inscription of 1792. Its style is closely comparable with a manuscript now at Cambridge, Ikenobō rikka no zu (CUL FJ.978.12) dated to the ‘seventeenth or eighteenth century’ (2223 in Hayashi and Kornicki, Early Japanese books in Cambridge University Library).

A striking and beautiful single sheet of brokatpapier, with devotional images printed in gilt in a style usually associated with Augsburg. This uncut sheet may have been destined for endpapers, each image neatly fitting an octavo-sized book.

First edition, falsely dated 1914 to evade the censorship of the occupying forces and actually issued in 1918. A beautiful woodcut illustrated study of the iconography of the ancient Flemish versions of the game of lotto, including the symbolism of the playing cards.

An interesting selection of watercolours, drawings and lithographs by a Victorian woman. Some are typical, if very accomplished, holiday or genre scenes, but there is an interesting scattering of domestic scenes: a women sewing, another at a substantial treadle sewing machine, making mincemeat, crocheting, picking peas, and drawing in an album. Of special interest are 5 original and probably unique lithographs, evidently the work of the same artist, nicely demonstrating the contemporary enthusiasm for amateur lithography among women. Some are trials for letterheads, giving the address: ‘The Rookery, George Lane, Parish of Woodford’ [Essex]. Among the travel watercolours are some really lovely seaside scenes and a finely observed interior of a railway sleeping compartment on the Geneva-Paris line.

First edition.

First edition.

A collection of children’s stories evidently written by a father (perhaps Herr Schmutzer, whose stamp appears in each) for two young daughters. Each volume is a separate story telling of the girls’ adventures around the world. The text is in German throughout and every page bears a large illustration. A terrifying insight into one early-twentieth century father’s idea of a family entertainment.

Das buch von den beiden Babys. [n.d. c. 1902]. Small 4to (206 × 165 mm), pp. [22], alternating text and drawings. A tale of parental neglect: a family outing on a steam train goes terribly wrong.

‘...Laurentia und Emerentia Stutzlmeier’. 1902. Folio (330 × 210 mm), ff. [30] (the last blank) of which 28 each bear text and a large drawing. Card wrappers, loose in cloth backed boards. The tale of two young sisters lost in the forest during a family picnic. Rescued from a wolf by a kindly hermit they embark on a series of miraculous adventures with a cartload of magic pears and a menagerie of animals. Reunited with their parents they return to the woods to find the hermit dying; they bury him and he is borne aloft by angels.

‘Die gar wundersame geschichte von den beiden Babys in der Techanei’. 1904. Folio (325 × 210 mm), ff. [56], of which 54 each bear text and a large drawing. Crudely sewn in cloth-backed boards, uniform with the above. The father takes his daughters out on an excursion, but an encounter with a witch separates the girls from him. Kidnapped in the witch’s house, they elude her protective snake, toad and cat and escape in a paper boat. Reunited with their father they embark on a series of terrifying adventures under his protection: he slaughters all assailants with a pistol, sword and bare hands, leaving a trail of bloodshed. A return to a derelict house scattered with the skeletons of pets and family members begins a new chapter, before the trio return home in a magical amphibious horse-drawn cart.

‘Die Geschichte von die beiden Babys und die Reise um die Erde’. 1910. Folio (340 × 205 mm), ff. [42], of which 41 each have text and a large drawing. Cloth backed boards. In this final volume Herr Schmutzer oversteps the mark. Taking his young daughters on a round-the-world trip in a self-propelled car (Gibraltar, Africa, Egypt, Persia, China, Siberia, The North Pole) he indulges in the worst kind of xenophobic violence against most of the inhabitants of the known world, all in the interests of the protection of his daughters.

A fine nineteenth-century collection of portraits showing members of the nobility after numerous artists such as C. Macpherson, W. Purser, J. Hayes, J. Wood and H. Corbould

First edition. Edward Jacob ‘antiquary and naturalist, was born in Canterbury, the eldest son of Edward Jacob (d. 1756), surgeon and alderman, who served as mayor of Canterbury in 1727–8, and Jane, daughter of Strangford Violl, vicar of Upminster. About 1735 he moved to Feversham [sic] where he lived at 78 Preston Street and practised as a surgeon, following in his father's and grandfather's footsteps. Among his patients was Lord Sondes of Lees Court, Sheldwich. The Jacobs were a long-established east Kent family and several members had served as mayors and magistrates in Sandwich and Dover. Actively interested in local affairs, Jacob was four times mayor of Faversham—in 1749, 1754, 1765, and 1775...

Jacob interested himself in the history of Faversham soon after he had moved there, ‘having an early propensity to the study of antiquities’. He was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries on 5 June 1755, and in 1774 published The History of the Town and Port of Faversham, dedicated to Lord Sondes’ (Oxford DNB).

This is one of the standard copies with 15 plates, some having an 4 additional plates. With a good local provenance (Philip Neame, Faversham-born recipient of the Victoria Cross for service on the Western Front and of an Olympic gold medal in 1924, apparently the only recipient of both).� Bibliotheca Cantiana 198-9.

First edition of this history of England (or more properly, Britain) from ancient times to the era of the American Revolution. The third volume, not always present is especially detailed as an account of the British colonial exploits on the American continent and elsewhere. David’s illustrations are characteristically dramatic. The text of the first two volumes (dated 1784) is by Pierre Le Tourneur and Guillaume Germaine Guyot, and of the latter (dated 1800) by Jean Baptiste Gabriel Marie Milcent. Cohen De Ricci 274 (vols. 1 and 2 only); Cioranescu 39980

A beguiling anonymous illustrated manuscript with painted miniatures on vellum. The text is a poem by French poet of Greek and Franco-Levantine origin, Chénier (1762-94) who perished under the guillotine during the Terror. Praised as a precursor of the Romantics, his work was rediscovered and published during the nineteeth century. His exotic subjects, coupled with his tragic end made him a favourite among devotees of the decadent.