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First edition, preserved in its contemporary wrapper. A panegyric given on the Feast of Saint Louis, patron saint of France in the church, to members of the Académies royales in the church of the Oratoire. Worldcat: Newberry and Michigan only outside France.

A very scarce early temperance movement sermon. ‘The use of liquor is inconsistent with any thing like pure and high spiritual enjoyment, clear spiritual views, and true devotion...’. Published in New York in the National Preacher in 1831 and rapidly reprinted within just a few months in several editions in London, where the Temperance movement was in its infancy. The British and Foreign Temperance Society issued its first report in 1831 (an extract is reproduced on p. 16 here). Worldcat/LibraryHub locate only a handful of copies of all issues, American and British (the former being extracts from the National Preacher).

First edition of this sermon on the tercentenary of the Reformation preached in Chapman’s independent evangelical chapel in Greenwich. An engraved portrait of the author, dated 1824, has been added. Worldcat/Library Hub locate copies at BL, Newcastle, Regent's Park College Library and Staatsbibliothek, Belrin only. No US copies.

A series of calligraphic models or exercises of impressive size and quality. The writer, who signs his (or just possibly, her) name, minutely, at the foot of the first leaf, has chosen two edifying texts to transcribe. The first three sheets contain passages (including one on the immorality of duelling) from Varietés serieuses et amusantes of 1765, while the other eight, rather unusually, contain letters from a father to a daughter (Émilie), are extracts from Abbé Gerard’s epistolary novel Le Comte de Valmont, ou les égarements de la raison of 1774. It would be unusual if this denoted a female scribe, but the choice of these extracts is tantalising.

Each leaf is ruled in leadpoint and bears a large calligraphic cartouche, some have an additional penwork initial roundel and most exhibit a variety of scripts of exceptional neatness and regularity.

First edition, rare. John Wesley had delivered a sermon at the laying of the foundation stone of the Methodist mother church in City Road in April 1777. In this critical pamphlet the ‘gentle Strictures’ promised by evangelical preacher Hill on the title-page turn out to be vitriolic criticisms of Wesley laid out in 37 chapters, attacking his self-centred address. Chapter 31 takes issue with Wesley’s perfidy in his perceived encouragement of the American revolution in Free Thoughts on the Present State of Public Affairs, in which he had stated the the British government’s attitude towards the Americans’ could no longer be defended. ESTC: UK: Birmingham, BL, Congregational Library, Rylands (3 copies), US: SMU and Wesley Theological Seminary.

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.

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.

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.