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Probably the first edition in French—one of several issues of the same year with the same pagination but differing title ornaments. First published in 1740 as The Chronicle of the Kings of England under the pseudonym of Nathan Ben Saddi, Dodsley here displayed his egalitarian leanings with this rewriting of English history in the style of the King James Version of the Old Testament Pentateuch. The imprint is false and it is unlikely that the French editions were actually printed in London. In this issue the engraved vignette on the title-page is a frame with a pedestal upon which are a spear, a shield, laurel wreaths and an owl, there are several variants, as enumerated in the ESTC. Rochedieu, p. 88 (noting issues with both Londres and Amsterdam imprints).

Sole edition. ‘And Enoch walked with God. Gen. V. 24.’ Apparently by an anonymous follower of the evangelical Church of England preacher, William Romaine — a spiritual meditation occasioned by a daily walk — a trope clearly derived from Romaine’s spiritual classic The Walk of Faith (1771), a work recommended in a postscript here: ‘Reader, if the perusal of this letter has been profitable unto you, and you desire to be further instructed how to live by Faith, and walk humbly and happily with your God, ---- I would recommend to you a Treatise of the Life of Faith, and one of the Walk of Faith; both by the Rev. Romaine Rector of St. Ann Blackfriars...’

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 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 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.

Hollar’s small format plates of European women and their costume are dated from 1642-4 and followed his successful series Ornatus muliebris Anglicanus of 1640. The plates were obtained by eighteenth-century printseller Robert Sayer, who issued them several times (with captions in English added) right up until his death in 1794. His widow may also have continued issuing and selling them into the early nineteenth-century. They are one of the best sources for seventeenth-century lay female dress and include several English subjects (A Noble Woman, a Merchant’s Wife of London, an English Gentlewoman, A Merchant’s Daughter, Lady of the Court, a Countrywoman etc) together with women of France, Ireland, Holland, Germany, Denmark, Belgium and Austria. Three of the plates at the end depict men of religious orders. cf. Colas 1466 (second edition of 1643); Lipperheide 30.

A Tours-printed miniature Imitatio Christi.

FIRST EDITION, a charming collection of Flemish madonnas printed in gold and colours. Jeanne Hebbelynck illustrated several children’s books, often with a devotional aspect.

First edition. Fragerolle had been Erik Satie’s co-pianist at the Chat Noir, composing most of the music for its revues. This is his delightful collection of old French Christmas carols, with ornaments to the wrapper, endpapers and text by Georges Auriol, also a member of the Chat Noir circle and friend of Satie. The wrapper, printed separately by Eugène Verneau and with trademark Auriol lettering, is particularly scarce.

First edition, inscribed by the artist to a young girl: ‘à ma chère amie Marguerite bien affectueusement. E. Moreau-Nélaton’. An unusual illustrated book of saints dedicated to his children, with plates in a distinctive gauzy style by painter, prodigious art collector and art historian, Moreau-Nélaton. His style was influenced by Édouard Manet and Berthe Morisot. OCLC lists the Bibliothèque nationale copy only.

An attractive Bohemian daily prayer book, evidently made for a girl, with simple illumination depicting the Virgin and Child, the Crucifixion and St John in the wilderness. The format and decoration are of a type familiar in Southern Germany at this date, but Bohemian examples are less common.

First edition. Marsh, biblical critic and later bishop of Peterborough was born at Faversham, Kent, on 10 December 1757 and educated at Faversham grammar school and the King's School, Canterbury, before going up to Cambridge. He travelled in Egypt, Arabia and Europe before returning to Cambridge for his BD. The Authenticity of the five Books of Moses, defending Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch was one of his qualifying sermons.

First edition of the Chevalier’s massive treatise on public administration largely composed in 1769, at the seat of his friend the fifth Earl Ferrers at Staunton Harald. Disgraced as Louis XV’s secret foreign correspondent in England, D’Eon became a consistently colourful figure; his celebrity as a high-living transvestite sometimes obscuring his military, political and literary achievements. Throughout the 1770s in London, doubts were expressed about D’Éon’s sex, and wagers were made, although at this point he professed to be indignant at the suggestion that he was not a man.

A volume is devoted to the commerce and affairs of Russia. Between 1755 and 1760 D’Eon had pursued a secret mission in Russia on behalf of the French government, aimed at establishing private lines of communication between Louis XV and the Empress Elizabeth. He was sent to London as a diplomat and spy in 1763, where his career initially flourished before he became entangled in the plots and rumours which were to bring him down. He became an expert in British statecraft, reflected in two of the volumes here. One of the British volumes in the collection is devoted partly to Scottish and partly American affairs.

First edition under this title. A very interesting global catalogue of marriage and courtship customs among Christians, Jews, Muslims and other religions. Not actually a translation from an English work as the title pretends, but a fairly direct copy of Louis de Gaya’s Cérémonies nuptiales de toutes les nations (1680), to which is added the polygamistic tale of M. Harry. Hurtaut was also responsible for the 1751 title L’Art de Péter (’The Art of Farting’). Gay I, 742.

A sumptuous Didot production, richly illustrated with the publisher’s state-of-the-art chromolithography and photogravure. Both first and second editions appeared in 1877. Uncommon in such fine, bright condition.

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. The passages of scripture ‘in the style of Ossian’ are in prose and verse and include ‘The Song of Deborah and Barak’, ‘Saul’s Death and David’s Lamentation’ and ‘The Tears of Salem’. The subscribers are mainly local to Northumberland and the Scottish Borders. Not in Jackson or Johnson. Scarce: ESTC: BL (2), Edinburgh, NLS, Bodley, Keble College, LC and Yale.

First editions of all three parts. The Poetical Essay ‘rehearses arguments from order and design to refute the teachings of Aristotle and Epicurus. It rewrites Lucretius’s apostrophe to Venus as an address to conscience, and ends by illustrating the providence of God through a brief, polemical, and strongly anti-Catholic history of the English church in the sixteenth century. The poem went through three editions, and was reprinted in Roberts’s Poems, editions of which appeared in 1774 and 1776’ (Oxford DNB). Jackson, pp. 9-10.

First edition, dedicated to ‘the people called Methodists in general—more especially to the Reverend the Clergy, and the Lay-Preachers in Connection with the Rev. John Wesley’.

Kershaw was an itinerant Methodist preacher from Halifax, who accompanied Wesley on some of his journeys to the North of England, and Scotland. In about 1770 he settled at Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, where ‘much of his leisure... was devoted to writing. In 1780 he published An Essay on the Principal Parts of the Book of the Revelations. The same year his epic poem The Methodist Attempted in Plain Metre was published in Nottingham. Wesley’s disapproval was less on the grounds of its lack of literary merit than for fear that it brought reproach on the Methodists and would hinder the sale and reading of more profitable literature. As a result, the Methodist conference of 1781 decreed that in future no preacher should publish until the text had been seen and edited by Wesley, and that any profits from such publications should be paid into a common fund’ (Oxford DNB). Not in Jackson; no in Johnson.