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Prayers and hymns for vespers on the feast of Saint Aquilinus (19 October), made for the curates of his chapel at Évreux. Aquilin was born at Bayeux c. 620 and served in the army of Frankish king Clovis II. He married but vowed to devote his life to God and the service of the poor. The couple settled at Évreux before he was named bishop, wherupon he built a cell by the cathedral and lived as a hermit. He died circa 695 and the oratory where he was buried was named after him, it remained the site of his veneration until its destruction under applied bombardment in 1943/4.

The manuscript was made by one Louis Fromont for his uncle Mathurin in 1656. The later inscriptions indicate it was bequeated by the curate Le Goulx around 1679.

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.

FIRST EDITION, SIGNED BY PRINNER. A SUPERB BOOK OF THE DEAD BY AN IMPORTANT TRANSGENDER ARTIST, habitually addressed by his friend Picasso as ‘Monsieur Madame’. A spectacular large-format engraved book—the text being burin engraved throughout by Anton Prinner. The text is drawn from the translation by Pierret after the Turin papyrus. It was published with the assistance of Robert J. Godet, who died shortly afterwards: Prinner signs on his behalf ‘pour J. Godet +’.

‘Anton Prinner, who was probably born Anna Prinner but lived as a man throughout his life, studied painting at the Budapest school of fine arts in 1920 and went to Paris in 1928. He then gave up painting for a while and studied occult sciences, esoteric doctrines and mystical philosophies... During the wartime German occupation of France, Prinner went into hiding, living in a squalid garret... He was an intriguing and enigmatic character, who lived a solitary and reclusive life, and the chronology of some stages of his work and life remains obscure.

When Prinner resumed painting in 1932 after his occult studies, he was much influenced by Mondrian's Neo-Plasticism and by Russian Constructivism. At that time, he also learned print-making, working in Atelier 17 in Paris with Stanley William Hayter. After his Constructivist period, which lasted from 1932 to 1937, he worked on low relief and then high relief sculpture, a medium always favoured by Constructivist artists. At some time, perhaps around 1939, he took up sculpture in the round, producing Woman with Braid. The technique of sculpture, or rather its internal logic, brought Prinner back to Figurative art.

During the German occupation, hidden away in his garret, Prinner devoted himself to drawing meticulous still-lifes of everyday objects in pen and ink. When he returned to sculpture, it was with the intention of creating works that would mediate with the occult forces which had preoccupied him... The composite creatures that emerge from his personal or esoteric obsessions, with their suggestions of aberrant nature, can also recall the work of Jean Arp.

From 1947 to 1949, Prinner worked on 66 etchings and dry-point illustrations for the Egyptian Book of the Dead, as well as a series of low reliefs on the same theme, which he exhibited in 1948...

Prinner took part in the exhibition The Avant-garde in Hungary, 1910-1930 (L’Avant-garde en Hongrie 1910-1930), which was held in the Galerie Franka Berndt, Paris, in 1984. He had two other exhibitions on returning to Paris from Vallauris, in 1965 and 1969’ (Benezit).

Number 133 of 200 copies on Rives Royal, (there were a further 10 examples on Japon séculaire, with an original drawing, 7 for collaborators on papiers divers. Total edition 217). Three copies located on Worldcat: Bibliotheque Nationale de France, National Art Library, Washington and the University of Oxford (the latter incomplete, with only 10 plates).

A Tours-printed miniature Imitatio Christi.

FIRST EDITION, EACH OF THE THREE PARTS SIGNED AND HAND NUMBERED BY THE ARTIST, number 25 of 30 copies, each handcoloured by Madeleine Smets-Lefrancq. An extraordinarily dramatic graphic interpretation of Revelation, with linocuts by the Franciscan monk and sceptic Fieullien (1903-1976), who had studied at l’Académie de Bruxelles under the Belgian painter Oswald Poreau. He worked in sculpture, stained glass and paint, but his best work was in his remarkable illustrated books, with their idiosyncratic lettering and unsettling (occasionally lurid) religious imagery.

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. Now 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 he himself 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.

A manuscript collection of devotional texts by (or about) the first official mistress of Louis XIV, who, after her fall from favour, retired to a Carmelite convent in 1674 and took the veil. Her penitence, lasting until her death in 1710 was widely discussed and generated many accounts as well as her own Réflexions sur la Miséricorde de Dieu, first published in 1680, frequently reprinted and forming the last part of our manuscript collection. Réflexions bears the strong influence of Bossuet, her teacher, but is also a semi-autobiographical work, considering the mercy of God for sinners, especially for courtesans who have renounced their sexual sins, done penance, and exiled themselves from the excesses of the court. The author appeals, in particular, to feminine figures of repentance and sanctity in the New Testament, notably Saint Mary Magdalene, as paradigms of the conversion she has undergone.

The texts in this manuscript copy (in an unusual and probably female hand) hand all seem to have been collected from printed sources. Contents:

—L’Abrégé de la vie de la pénitence de Madame la duchesse de La Vallière. pp. 1-22
—Lettres de la soeur de la Vallière à Monsieur le maréchal de Bellefond soit avant soit depuis son entrée aux Carmélites. pp. 22-107
—Elévations de coeur à nôtre Seigneur Jesus-christ par rapport à la sainte Communion composées par la soeur Louise de la Miséricorde et tirées mot à mot de l'extrait écrit de sa main. pp. 107-118
—Lettre circulaire des Carmélites. pp. 118-141
—Sermon de messire Jean-Louis de Fromentières (...) pour la vêture de Madame de La Vallière. pp. 142-207
—Sermon pour la profession de Madame Françoise de la Baume Le Blanc de la Vallière duchesse de Vaujour prononcé en présence de la Reine le 4 juin 1675 dans l’Eglise des carmélites du fauxbourg saint Jacques. pp. 207-271
—Réflexions sur la Miséricorde de Dieu en forme de prières. pp. 271-350.

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.