Search

An exceptionally rare English calendar with two revolving dials (one giving the date, the other, the month with its corresponding number of days). Around the central calendar and dial are emblematic figures of the gods representing the days of the week: Apollo (Sunday), Diana (Monday), Mars (Tuesday), Mercury (Wednesday), Jove or Jupiter (Thursday), (Friday) and Saturn (Saturday).

John Seller (1632-1697), whose initials appear at the foot, and his full name in the globe at the head, was one of the most important mapmakers and makers of scientific instruments in seventeenth-century London. Examples of paper instruments made by him are exceptionally rare, and while the perpetual calendar may have been one of his simplest offerings in this line it probably had the widest appeal. However many copies he printed, its rarity is understandable: we can find no example of this calendar in library catalogues, though a similar calendar (also framed, with rundles, but uncoloured) appeared in the British trade several years ago (then described as possibly unique). The estimated date of production is approximate, and based partly on Seller’s output of pocket almanacs and similar (at least one issued with volvelles) in the 1680s. The presence of his initials as well as imprint suggests that the engraved design is Sellers’ own.

Seller operated throughout his documented career from premises at the Hermitage Stairs in Wapping, but for a number of years maintained additional retail premises in and about the Royal Exchange. He was a member of the Clockmakers Company from 1667 and served as its warden from 1692-6.

‘Writing to The Times in May 1824, the industrialist and philanthropist Robert Owen remarked that in recent years ‘the human mind has made the most rapid and extensive strides in the knowledge of human nature, and in general knowledge’. He called this ‘the march of intellect’ and believed it had reached a pace that could not be stopped. Building upon this, Henry Brougham established the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in 1826, with the purpose of enabling the education of the masses. The phrase ‘the March of Intellect’ became a rallying cry for social and technological progress, its importance being to give all classes the opportunity to better themselves. To others, though, it was seen as giving hope where in fact there was no opportunity and of raising people above their station. Would the March of Intellect benefit society or stagnate it?

Amongst those uncertain of its benefits was cartoonist William Heath who, in 1828, under the pen name Paul Pry, produced a series of posters called the March of Intellect. Even though Heath was satirising the movement, his posters include some wonderful future ideas for transport, including a steam horse and a steam coach, a vacuum tube, a bridge to Cape Town, and various forms of flight, including a flying postman’ Ashley, ‘Inventing the Future’, British Library website, Discovering Literature: Romantics & Victorians.

A satire against corruption: a huge automaton representing the new London University (later University College, London) tramples over greedy clerics, doctors, lawyers and the crown.

One of a set of three Gillray prints of medical conditions that were also astute studies in facial expression.

The printer, Hannah Humphrey, is an interesting figure. Known as ‘Mrs Humphrey’ although she was unmarried, she was sister of printer William Humphrey from whose address in St Martin's Lane she published her first prints. She became the leading publisher of expensive satirical prints, especially by Gillray who worked for her exclusively from 1791, and who lived in her house for the last twenty years of his life. ‘The two lived together in circumstances of domestic intimacy for many years, but so discreetly that the prurient gossips of the next generation could find little to say against them. When Gillray made his will in 1807 he left all his possessions 'to my dearest friend Hannah Humphrey' (Oxford DNB). BM Satires 10304.

First edition, usually attributed to Fanny de Beauharnais, the popular salon host and aunt by marriage to the future Empress Joséphine. A collection of essays, a novella, a dramatic piece and several poems, it derives its name from the contemporary vogue for ‘somnabulism’ or mesmerism, popular in the last quarter of the century in spite of the rationalism of the so-called Enlightenment.

Apart from the comedy Les Illuminés, an overt satire on mesmerism, the most interesting part is the utopian novella, Relation très-véritable d’une île nouvellement découvert. A young chevalier, a collector of natural history specimens and other curios, take a trip to the Indes in search of the wisdom of the Brahmins. He takes an aerostatic balloon with him and finds himself on a desert island (’L’Île des Cocotoiers’) of which he makes an aerial survey. It is inhabited only by women and girls, whose rank is denoted by the possession, respectively, of hair or feathers. He is willingly captured by some of them, who believe him to be one of their own kind, not knowing the meaning of ‘man’ or ‘woman’. He is taken to their leader, where it becomes apparent that they have no concept of sex or gender, nor concomitantly of happiness or sadness. They each live for many hundreds of years, and their queen is periodally reborn, phoenix-like. Though charmed by the beauty of the islanders, the chevalier soon tires of the monotony of their lives and sails away in his balloon.

Not in fact posthumous, the entire framing of the book is ironic and satirical, and the author claims it to have been written by a friend in a state of somnambulism under a specially magnetised tree in the Champs Elysées, giving a peculiarly acute insight into the secrets of the hearts of men: ‘Mon plus intime ami, dont je donne ici l’ouvrage,... le hasard le conduisit sous cet arbre merveilleux où il s’assit. Mon ami se trouva dans un état de bonheur dont lui seul pourrait rendre compte...)Il voit, depuis ce moment, tous les corps diaphanes, et pénètre les plus secrètes pensées ; mais je n'en abuse pas de peur d'augmenter le nombre de divorces.... Je pourrais indiquer l'arbre en question; mais tout bien calculé, je crois qu'il ne faut pas que les hommes en général, et les maris en particulier, deviennent trop pénétrans [sic]; peut-être ferait-on bien de demander la permission d'abattre cet arbre.’ (Avertissement) Barbier, IV, p. 525; Cioranescu 10294 (’fausse attribution’).

First edition of a pioneering work in the field of forensic medicine, the graphic images depict numerous conditions resulting from homicidal and suicidal injuries. The grisly and powerful photographs show skull and bone fractures, the impact of gunshot wounds, burns, injuries caused by stabbings, the effects of hanging and so on. Each set of 50 plates is accompanied by a booklet providing details of each image and the important features from the legal-medico cases from which the photographs have been obtained. Heidtmann, Bibliographie der Photographie: Deutschsprachige Publikationen, 14062. OCLC locates 4 US copies and no UK copies.

First edition, British issue, with Crosby Lockwood and Sons stamp, adverts and variant binding. An important pre-Great War account, extensively illustrated and with a final chapter on aerial warfare and its potential

First edition. Hill’s numerous books were among the most popular cookery books of the nineteenth-century, though now less well known than Mrs Beeton. The Breakfast Book is a wonderfully comprehensive to the middle class English Victorian breakfast, eaten across the British Empire, often consisting of several courses and a stomach-groaning spread of meats, fish and pastries, enlivened with fruit. Includes bills of fare fir set breakfasts for eight to twelve people. ‘Brain cakes’, beefsteaks, caviar, prawns and oysters all feature.

She published at least 21 books, almost all anonymous, from The Gourmet's Guide to Rabbit Cooking (1859) to How to Cook Vegetables in One Hundred Different Ways (1868) and numerous articles. ‘Hill's titles reveal her particular approach, which was that of the specialist and expert, at a time when the fashion was more for the compendium style of recipe collection, most famously characterized by Beeton's Book of Household Management (1861). She drew extensively upon examples of different approaches to food and cooking elsewhere in Europe’ (Rich in Oxford DNB).

Norbert Wiener's copy of the first English edition of Pierre de Latil's acclaimed introduction to cybernetics, sent to Wiener by the publishers as a review copy. Wiener was the immensely influential pioneering founder of the field of cybernetics and his review of the work headlines the text on the back of the dust-jacket: ‘I definitely think that it is one of the really good popularizations of cybernetics.’ The title was first published in 1953 in Paris as La Pensée Artificielle.

One of Heath’s famous satires on the theme of The March of Intellect, which expressed contemporary anxieties over progress and social change in England brought about by science, education, industrialisation and commercialisation. This one shows a London street corner at the edge of open country and the sea, with numerous figures, including a street-sweeper, horse-drawn carriage, two men playing chess, musicians and singers and street-sellers, with wealthy figures being sent down a mechanical lift beside giant shop window to left; a steam carriage is seen in background with balloons and a rocket-powered flying ship in the air beside bridge crossing the English Channel between 'Dover' and 'Calais’.

A classic pre-Prohibition American cocktail book. Jacob ‘Jack’ Grohusko was the head bartender at Baracca’s restaurant in New York, having been born in England to a Russian Jewish family and brought to New York as an infant. Jack’s Manual has 17 pages on the different types of wine (particularly champagne, sauternes and burgundies) and liquor, and 61 pages of recipes for cocktails.

This 1910 edition was preceded by a very rare 1908 edition (NLM and LC only in Worldcat). Jack’s was the first cocktail book to include the Brooklyn, perhaps his own creation, and several others which would be immortalised in the much later Savoy Cocktail Book (1930).

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.

First separate edition of Seguin’s tables of squares and cubes designed for architects and for other practical purposes. The tables were originally issued as an appendix to his Manuel d’architecture (1786) Worldcat: Cornell and Brigham Young only.

First separate edition, also issued simultaneously as a suite to the author’s Question de longitude sur mer (1833), but here issued alone with its own title-page and errata leaf forming a wrapper. The final 4 leaves are adverts for the author’s controversial mechanical planispheres, one of which is illustrated in the very large folding plate.

Demonville had been a printer (and the son of a printer to the Académie française) but diversified as a maker of globes scientific instruments after losing his licence to print in Paris. In the year of publication, he acquired notoriety as an astronomical crank who denied the astronomy of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Halley and Herschel. His planispehere demonstrates his alternative system: the earth, the sun and the moon are the only astronomical bodies; the earth does not rotate (it merely nods a little over the course of a year); the moon is 250 leagues from the earth and the sun, just 1500; the stars are affixed to the crystalline sphere; and the planets have no corporeal existence. Demonville hawked his system (with both books and his instruments) around Paris and London, even obtaining an audience with William III, who asked the Royal Society for their opinion. With his longitude pamphlets he sought to obtain prizes from the Societies of Paris and London but ideas were roundly dismissed, and Demonville pilloried in the press. Both issues rare.

First edition of this rare Italian contribution to the aeronautical excitements of 1784, addressed to the Paris Académie royale. Bruno proposed an elegant and elaborate gondola with oars and sails in an early attempt to solve the problem of steering a dirigible balloon (Lynn, The Sublime Invention: Ballooning in Europe, 1783-1820, p. 55). The work also included a proposal for a personal flotation device (for navigating water). It was reviewed at some length in the Rome Memorie per le belle arte in 1788. Worldcat: LC, US Airforce Academy, Hagley Museum and Harvard in US. There is a copy in the BL.

First edition of this collection of verse by the young tutor to Edward Jenner’s children, which also contains journal extracts, together with addresses and verses on the benefits of vaccination. Worgan (1790-1809) was ‘a consumptive boy of precocious ability whom Jenner took into his household, nominally as a tutor to his sons.’ Jackson, p. 344.

First published in 1865 and hugely popular, this copy of the seventh edition is from the library of Napoleon III.

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 seventeenth-century manuscript copy of Dubreuil’s La Perspective Pratique necessaire a tous peintres, graveurs, sculpteurs, architectes, orfevres, brodeurs, tapissiers, & autres se servans du dessein... première partie, first published in 1642. Evidently well-used, rebound in the nineteenth-century, and to judge from the binding, still handled and used thereafter, this is a large illustrated fragment consisting of parts 1, 2 and most of 3 (of 7) of the text. The original title-page and front matter, was replaced by a simple manuscript title, probably at the time of rebinding.

La Perspective Pratique, by Jean Dubreuil ‘the Jesuit’ (1602–1670) was popular among artists, architects and designers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and was still being used by artists well into the nineteenth century as a practical introduction to perspective drawing. As the original title indicates it was intended for the use of painters, engravers, sculptors, goldsmiths, embroiderers and tapestry workers and had a very wide circulation, reprinted in numerous editions, including several in English. It proceeds from the principles of drawing simple shapes and solids in perspective, to specific objects such as chairs, tables, opening chests and shelving, then to buildings and townscapes. Each set of instructions is accompanied by detailed illustrations, which were widely copied. In the printed editions, these were presented as engraved plates opposite the letterpress text, but in this manuscript they are carefully incorporated into the text for ease of use. It seems to have been a practical handbook, extensively, but carefully handled (but not marked or annotated) over a long period of time.

Third edition (first 1771). Maude’s best-known work and a very popular poem, according to Aubin, who quotes from it extensively. The preface contains ‘his well considered observations on the nature of descriptive poetry... Like Crabbe, Maude fully realizes that the English bumpkin is too greatly harassed by cares to be the ideal poetic rustic.’ Jackson, p. 84. It occupies a curious place in the canon of works about Isaac Newton: apart from the plate depicting Newton’s paternal home, it represents the sole source for an oft-repeated anecdote of Newton’s rebuke to his pet dog Diamond (’Oh Diamond! Diamond! thou little knowest the mischief done’) for upsetting a candle and burning his papers (Gjertsen, The Newton Handbook, p. 177). The anecdote is almost certainly apocryphal. Aubin, pp. 367; Jackson p, 84.

First edition of this important early treatise on the practical construction of the reflecting telescope. It is precisely contemporary with Robert Smith’s System of Opticks (also 1738), and both books share credit as the first manuals devoted to the construction of this instrument. Later editions, with the title Construction d’un telescope par reflexion de Mr. Newton, appeared in 1741 and 1756.

The invention of the reflecting telescope is generally attributed to Isaac Newton who built one in 1668. However, due to the extreme difficulty of producing mirrors of sufficient quality, his telescope was not widely adopted until the 1720s and 1730s when British instrument makers began to produce finely polished metal mirrors and the reflecting telescope became a practical reality for European astronomers. Passemant, one of the most celebrated instrument makers of his age, later Ingenieur du Roy, built several to the design depicted in the folding plate here. cf. Babson, Newton Collection, 157, (describing the 1741 edition only, now in the Huntington Library) ‘Passemant was a Frenchman who lived in Geneva and constructed not only telescopes, but also astronomical clocks and other instruments. This rare book contains many trade secrets’. Worldcat: copies Harvard, Stanford, U. South Carolina, Cornell and Cambridge (UK) only outside continental Europe. There is also a copy at Linda Hall.