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Probabaly compiled in the aftermath of the Seven Years War, this anonymous pocket treatise on the art of war comprises six chapters: [1] Maximes générales; [2] Des Camps de Rassemblement; [3]. La Guerre de Campagne, comprend l’objet, le plan général, le plan particulier, la conduite, re résultat et la fin des operations; [4] Campagnes de deffensive; [5] Campagnes d’hiver; [6] des Capitulations. Written from the point of view of a prospective military commander or general, it introduces the principles and objectives of campaign warfare of the sort that dominated European history in the eighteenth century. It makes occasional references to historical persons (Turenne and the Duc de Broglie) as well as to more recent events, such as the winter campaigns of 1757-9).

Provenance: Early ownership inscription: Antonio Lopez; Marquis d'Astorga, sale 1870 (described as from the library of the Dukes of Sessa); Bookplate of Ricardo Heredia, comte de Benahavis, sold as lot 551, Paul, Huard & Guillemin, Drouot (Paris), May, 1891.

First edition of this graphic propaganda piece encouraging the projected invasion of Britain by Napoleon’s Revolutionary government. By pushing the definition of invasion and by including a long series of medieval coastal raids on Southern England, General Girardin can list 45 ‘invasions’ from 1066 to the present, with 41 being successful.

First edition. A scarce provincial tribute to Wellington, the subscribers list consisting almost entirely of Northumberland names, in Sunderland, Monkwearmouth and Bishopwearmouth. Worldcat: Stanford and Indiana only in US. Jackson, p. 390; Johnson 846.

Henry Herbert, tenth earl of Pembroke and seventh earl of Montgomery (1734–1794) led a colourful life: after the Grand Tour he became a cavalry officer, married Lady Elizabeth Spencer and was appointed lord lieutenant of Wiltshire and a lord of the bedchamber to the prince of Wales He was forced to give up the latter when he eloped abroad with Elizabeth Catherine (Kitty) Hunter, by whom he fathered a son. Lady Elizabeth took her husband back in 1763, but he continued to have barely-concealed affairs: Walpole admitting he was ‘not surprised at any extravagance in his Lordship’s morals’.

‘Since youth Pembroke had been, in his own words, “horse mad”... and he had attended riding academies during his grand tour... In 1761 Pembroke published A Method of Breaking Horses, and Teaching Soldiers to Ride (2nd edn 1762; 3rd and 4th edns 1778 and 1793 entitled Military Equitation). This influential book provided sensible and much-needed advice. The author emphasized the need for officers to superintend the management of horses, advocated riding with a natural seat, and opposed the docking of horses’ tails’ (Oxford DNB).

The third edition was published at Salisbury, close by Pembroke’s family seat at Wilton, and this copy contains an inscription in French apparently recording its presentation: ‘De la part de Mylord Pembroke’.

A rare lithographic curiosity — a complete facsimile of a soldier’s pocket notebook kept during the Rhine campaigns of the French Revolutionary wars (1798-1800). Fortin had been named a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in 1807.

A remarkable manuscript account of a French campaign in Bavaria and Bohemia during the first Silesian War, in the form of extracts from (unpublished) letters from an artillery major. It is subtitled: ‘Extrait des lettres ecrittes par Mr. Du Gravier surtout ce qui s’est passé depuis le depart des Trouppes de France pour la Bavière, jusqu’au retour de celles que Mr. Le M[arécha]l de Belisle a ramenée de Prague.’ The campaign was led by the Maréchals de Broglie and de Belle Isle and the detailed extracts cover the march to Prague, its storming by French troops in 26 November 1741, the subsequent siege at the hands of the Austrian army and the escape of some 14,000 French troops from the city in December 1742.

A commemorative volume (’Not for Publication’) issued to accompany the Nepalese Prime Minister’s visit to HMS Dreadnought on exercise in the English Channel. The superb photographs depict: The Dreadnought, a submarine (4 plates: beached; on the surface; in the act of diving; submerged), a torpedo boat destroyer (2 plates: ‘going 30 knots’, ‘going 36 knots’). The Nepalese deputation witnessed a demonstration of firing from the Dreadnought and of the deflection of torpedoes with its safety nets. Dreanought, pride of the British navy, launched in 1906 was a revolutionary battleship which stimulated the Anglo-German arms race and gave its name to an entire class of heavily armoured craft. It was widely publicised as part of British naval propaganda and shown-off to numerous foreign visitors. The Nepalese Prime Minister was the Maharaja Sri Teen Chandra Shamsher Jang Bahadur Rana (1863–1929), one of three nephews who had ordered the assassination of their uncle Maharaja Ranodip Singh Kunwar in the Nepali coup of 1885.

Two years later, Dreadnought was at the centre of an embarrassing episode in which several members of the Bloomsbury Group (including Virginia Woolf) led by Horace de Vere Cole masqueraded as an Abyssinian royal party on a similar state visit, inspecting the ship in full costume, talking among themselves in Latin and Greek and exclaiming ‘Bunga Bunga!’ at every appropriate opportunity. They narrowly escaped arrest. OCLC/Copac list the Imperial War Museum copy only.

A collection of 12 scarce treaties between Britain and her allies following the French declaration of war in 1793 and one further treaty negotiated with Bavaria in 1800. The backbone of the British war policy, these 1793 agreements were designed to create an allied coalition against the French, of which the axis would be Britain and the German powers, with further support from subsidiary powers in the Baltic, Mediterranean and Atlantic. However, the speed and efficiency with which these agreements were signed belies the complex and conflicting aims of each nation and the subsequent rapid disintegration of the policy.

Britain's initial admiration for the evolving Revolution in France quickly changed to alarm with the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793, followed by the French declarations of war on Britain and the Dutch Republic on February 1 and Spain on March 7. French war-mongering had already led to the annexation of Savoy, Belgium and the Rhineland in 1792 and French ambitions were spelt out by Danton in the National Convention: "The frontiers of France have been mapped by nature, and we shall reach them at the four corners of the horizon, on the banks of the Rhine, by the side of the ocean and at the Alps. It is there that we shall reach the limits of our Republic."

Notably, the first two agreements were conventions signed with Russia, one uniting the two countries as allies against the aggressions of France and securing Russia's cooperation in the naval war, the other being a trade agreement, which finally settled a longstanding commercial dispute between Britain and Russia. Signed on the same day in March 1793, a contemporary commentator wryly noted that it seemed the two powers were competing as to "who shall be most fond and shall kiss the first". However, despite the apparent goodwill on both sides, the conventions never led to full and binding treaties.

Similarly, the terms of the convention signed with Prussia unravelled almost as soon as the ink was dry and within two months Frederick William II was demanding significant additional terms. Lord Grenville, Britain's Foreign Secretary, took a dim view of such demands and having first shored up his own position by negotiating a separate agreement with Austria, he initially refused to comply with Prussian requests. However, under pressure from Pitt and Dundas, Grenville was forced to negotiate further with the Prussians, with the result that the Austrians were in turn estranged.

Like Russia, the Spanish had their own motives for joining the war and despite the successful signing of the convention of Aranjuez, which committed both parties to explore the prospects of an alliance, a further agreement was never reached. Alliances with Portugal, Sardinia and Sicily proved equally problematic in the following months. The four earliest agreements were also published as a collection in London by J. Debrett in 1793. The identical title pages of the first two Russian treaties make it impossible to identify which edition is held at each of the 5 libraries listed on ESTC. The final treaty, published by A. Strahan, is particularly scarce, with only one copy recorded on ESTC (Cambridge).

First German edition of Charnock’s biography of Nelson. First published in English in 1806, the work is notable for Charnock's use of Nelson's original letters and first-hand accounts of his life. The engraved plates appear to have been specifically prepared for this rare German edition, of which there appear to be no institutional copies in the UK or US. COPAC/OCLC list no copies in British Libraries (and none outside continental Europe).

The Mémoires are the principal source for the political, economic, military and legal history of the reign of Henry IV (“le Grand”), compiled by the king’s most able and most trusted minister. Henry’s reign marked the rehabilitation of France’s fortunes after the near-disintegration of the country during the Wars of Religion. Sully’s collection represents a very immediate account of the period between 1570 and 1628, including episodes such as Henry’s conversion to Catholicism (arguably a political expediency urged by Sully himself, who remained Protestant); the Edict of Nantes (which promised religious toleration for the Huguenots); negotiations with the English crown (both Elizabeth and James I); and war with Spain (in alliance with England). Sully’s own contrubution to the state is amply recorded - he is remembered for his reorganisation of the country’s finances and system of office-holding as well as for his engineering projects (the Place Royale and the Briare Canal linking Seine and Loire being the best known). The Mémoires are historiographically advanced and include both critical narrative and a large number of transcribed diplomatic material. They have, however, been criticized for partiality and for containing “many fictions, such as a mission undertaken by Sully to Queen Elizabeth in 1601, and the famous ‘Grand Design,’ a plan for a Christian republic [or a United States of Europe], which some historians have taken seriously” (Ency. Brit, 1911).

The work was completed posthumously by a second volume (present here) under the editorship of J. Le Laboureur. The bibliography of this work has been contentious. For a long time, our edition with the coloured frontispieces was accepted as the first, published with a false imprint at the Chateau de Sully itself. It is now clear that there were actually as many as 3 issues bearing versions of these title pages: the exceptionally rare true first edition printed under Sully’s eye (with a different collation to ours); our swiftly-produced contrefaçon of the same year, and one other pirate edition. Complete sets of any edition are rare. Brunet V, 589-90; Cioranesco 63703.