Search

A rare moveable volvelle perpetual calendar depicting the French royal family as restored after the fall of Napoleon. The dials give years from 1816 to 1823, the dates for days of the week, along with lengths of day and night, sunrise and sunset, the month and the corresponding sign of the zodiac. A calendar giving traditional Gregorian dates such as this takes on a political aspect, printed as it was after an era in which strenuous efforts had been made to suppress the Gregorian calendar in favour of the revolutionary calendar and dates (years, months and days of the week) entirely reinvented.

The portraits of the royal family (Louis XVIII), the duc and duchesse d’Angoulême and the comtes d’Artois and de Berri, are placed above an architectural frieze depicting Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette bidding farewell to their families before execution. The absence of the duchesse de Berri, who married the duke only in June 1816 provides the latest likely date of publication, though it is probable that the print appeared earlier — in December 1815, in preparation for the new year. We have found no record of this calendar print in the usual online resources, either in Europe or further afield.

A spectacular renaissance illustrated book, the first edition with the detailed and dramatic double-page etched plates by Jost Amman. First published at Lyon in 1529 with single-page woodcuts (reprinted with the same woodcuts in 1546) there were also Venice editions of 1569, 1571 and 1576 with quarter-page woodcuts.

A vast encyclopaedic work, the Catalogus gloriae mundi sought to set out the hierarchy of creation —animate and inanimate, from the heavens themselves to the governments, laws and sciences of humanity. Its particular value was in setting out orders of precedency and protocol in law and ceremony, which probably accounts for its interest to publisher Sigmund Feyerabend, who enlisted Amman to create large emblematic plates for this edition, derived from the earlier woodcut illustrations. They are:

1. A genealogy with insignia of royal houses (including European houses and those of Persia, Egypt, Israel etc); 2. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; 3. a mandala depicting the ranks of the hierarchy of the heavens; 4. a sitting of the papal court; 5. an imperial council; 6. a regal council; 7. a judicial court; 8. the nobility; 9. the military ranks; 10. The liberal arts and sciences (14 female personifications); 11. the mechanical arts (7 female personifications); 12. a geocentric cosmography. Andresen, A. Jost Amman, 32-43; The New Hollstein: German Engravings, Etchings and Woodcuts 1400-1700, 1998, VI.144. A very scarce book. Worldcat lists non-European copies at Folger, Getty and Huntington libraries only.

First edition of this important report on the history of opium use and trade in China, printed in China but considered the the first English-language book on opium. Its author was a British missionary long established in the Far East as a translator for the Inspectorate General of Customs at Shanghai. It provides not only botanical and medicinal accounts drawn from earlier Chinese sources, but traces the introduction of opium by Arab and then European traders which had led to the nineteenth-century opium wars.

A rare and amusing satire on the practice of acupunture ― much in vogue among certain Parisian doctors in the early nineteenth century. A sickly male patient is receiving a doctor’s needles, the longest of which is seemingly destined for his heart; a young woman in a bonnet seems unimpressed with her needles (one pierces her tongue); while a young man throws down a set of crutches. On the wall behind hangs a painting of the martrydom of Saint Sebastian. Though known in France since the seventeenth century, acupuncture was revived in the decades after 1800 — Doctor Louis-Joseph Berlioz (1776–1858, the composer’s father) claimed to have used it successfully in 1810 and published a paper on the subject, while Jules Cloquet published his influential Traité de l’acupuncture in 1826.
The print was listed in the Bibliographie de France for 1825 (p. 172). It was published by Mantoux and Cheyère (cf. the Paris Musée Carnavalet copy) though in our example Mantoux’s name has been cancelled in the imprint line.

First and only edition of a rare set of commercial tables for calculating interest, complete with its original card ‘indicateur’ to be laid over the tables, giving solutions. Based on a rate of 5 percent, the tables provide interest calculations for periods from one day to five years. Jacquand is styled ‘Commis-Greffier du tribunat de 1re instance de Tournon (Ardèche) et ancien professeur de Mathématiques’. The town of Tournon, on the banks of the Rhône south of Lyon, was an important trading place — particularly for wine — and through its Jesuit college also had a longstanding educational history.
This is a very rare French provincial imprint. The verso of the title page leaves a space for the author’s signature as a guard against counterfeits (never filled in) and spaces for adding booksellers’ or stationers’ names, again not completed. Worldcat lists a single copy (Bibliothèque nationale).

First edition. A very rare collection of floral engravings for the use of goldsmiths, artists or needleworkers, this copy evidently used by an artist at an early date (perhaps the Nicolas Despeche, whose 1684 inscription appears at the foot of the title). With 20 plates in all the collection comprises the 10 plates from the Livres de Fleurs (including the title) plus an additional 10 plates (4 signed in the plate by Vauquer with the imprint of N. Langlois, the remainder unsigned) evidently combined in the early 1680s from the selection of Vauquer plates offered in Paris by publisher De Poilly.
Vauquer (or Vauquier) was an etcher, draughtsman and gold-engraver (1621-86). His superb prints show a ‘delicate line, after his own compositions and those of Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer, his master and kinsman. Apart from a few biblical subjects on black ground for medals, snuff-boxes or watch-cases, he mostly represented flowers in bouquets or in vases, baskets, garlands or friezes. These were published by Nicolas Langlois (1640–1703) or François de Poilly (1623–93), often grouped in series: Livre de fleurs (10 pls); Vases de fleurs propre pour les peintres, brodeurs et dessinateurs (40 pls); Livres de fleurs propre pour les orfèvres et graveurs (8 pls, signed v. f. with the annotation à Blois). According to Mariette, Vauquer was skilled in drawing flowers and particularly excelled in engraving flowers and other decorations on jewellery’ (Grove Art).
Contemporary and later collections of these plates are rare and show considerable variation, the individual parts and probably the plates themselves sold and bound to order. Our collection has the 10 numbered plates of the Livre de Fleurs, each (save the title) showing a well chosen bunch of flowers in globular glass vases, exquisitely rendered; then the four following plates with the Langlois imprints show stems of different flowers bound with ribbons, while the remaining plates are detailed studies of flower forms. Dunthorne, Flower and Fruit Prints of the 18th and early 19th centuries (1938), 317.

First edition of Artus’s satire on Henri III of France (assassinated in 1589) who was reputedly fond of cross-dressing and whose court was widely criticised for decadence and immorality.
Les Hermaphrodites describes a realm populated by men who dress as women, not strictly (or biologically) hermaphrodite, but preoccupied by dress, hairstyle, makeup, extravagant gesture and speech. Also concerned with the laws and customs of the hermaphrodite kingdom, the satire operates by seeking to present Henri’s court as both dissolute and against nature. In so doing it reflects in great detail contemporary attitudes (both positive and negative) to gender-blurring of any sort, whether social or sexual. At one point, for example, Artus writes ironically that cross-dressing was perfectly permissible: ‘Chacun pourra s’abiller à sa fantasie, pourveu que ce soit bravement, superbement, & sans aucune distinction ny consideration de sa qualité ou faculté’, thus combining his disapproval with a suggestion of the negation of natural order or rank.
The engraved title depicts a figure of ambiguous gender (presumably Henri himself) in male breeches, but full-hipped, with a suggestion of female breasts and a floral coiffe, with the legend ‘A tous accords’. Below it is the text:
‘Je ne suis masle ny femelle
Et sy je suis bien en ceruelle
Le quell des deux je doibs choisir
Mais qu’importe à qui on ressamble
Il vault mieux les avoir ensemble
On en reçoit double Plaisir.’
Henri’s sexuality was the subject of numerous contemporary satires. His taste for cross-dressing was well-known and his sexual orientation a matter of speculation, since he enjoyed close relationships with his male mignons (providing plenty of ammunition for moralistic detractors) but also well-publicised affairs with a succession of mistresses.
The second part of the book is Discours de Jacophile a Limne. Les Hermaphrodites was republished in 1724 with the title Description de l’isle des Hermaphrodites. The first edition is notably rare.
The arms of the contemporary binding are of the Clausse de Marchaumont family, probaby those of courtier Henri (d. 1613), the eldest son of Henry II’s secreatary of state Cosme Clausse, who served as Henry III’s ambassador to the Swiss states.

A curious florilegium, with extensive lithographed devotional text, presumably after the handwriting of author (’Jean, prêtre’) and a series of handcoloured lithographs. The latter include 31 of flowers (marigold, violet, primula, iris, cornflower, honeysuckle etc) which are paired with a description and devotional meditation on the opposite page. The others depict a hermit, a memento mori, a decorative contents list and (at the end) women in a religious procession with a banner. At least one them is signed ‘Jean’. The prefatory text is from Chateaubriand’s Le Martyrs: ‘En achevant ces mots, Zacharie s’arrêta, me montra le ciel où nous devions nous retrouver un jour, et, sans me laisser le temps de me jeter à ses pieds, il me quitta après m’avoir donné sa dernière leçon. C’est ainsi que Jésus-Christ dont il imite l’exemple, se plaisoit à instruire ses disciples, en se promenant au bord du lac de Génésareth, et faisoit parler l'herbe des champs et le lis de la vallée’.

Although marked ‘Deposé’ on the first leaf, we have been unable to find any other copies or record of its publication. It was presumably printed in very small numbers.

First edition of the first geometry manual published in French ― considered the earliest scientific manual in French. Bovelles stood at the beginning of a new French tradition of teaching science and mathematics in the vernacular, and his aim (stated in his interesting preface) was to provide a text not for the speculative Latinist, but for the ‘common workman’. This was more than simply an author’s trope, since his text is indeed practical throughout, regularly referring to the material and physical conditions of the figures in question, not simply their theoretical forms, ‘implying that this geometry belongs to craftsmen, not scholars’. ‘[Bovelles] published the Géometrie François in 1511, the same year that the first illustrated edition of Vitruvius’s ten books on architecture was published in Venice. Unlike Vitruvius, however, Bovelles claimed to have written his book not for elite, Latinate readers, but for those he called ‘common’ [plebes] workmen. Today, this book exists only in few copies, and it was not reprinted.’ (Ooosterhoff, ‘Early French Readerships of technical Print’ in Translating Early Modern Science, eds. Fransen, Hodson, and Enenkel (2017), p. 209). The book proved popular and enduring with new editions of 1542, 1547 (enlarged), 1551, 1555 (two), 1557, 1566 and 1608.
Born in Picardy around 1471, De Bovelles studied at Paris with the humanist Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples though evidently left the city during the plague of 1495 without taking a degree. He subsequently worked on numerous mathematical problems, notably squaring the circle by mechanical means, of which he gave an account in the Latin Geometricae introductionis published in 1503. This book was followed by Liber de XII numeris in 1510, considering perfect numbers, and by the present Géometrie of 1511. Besides mathematics De Bovelles is important for his 1509 De Sapiente in which he suggested that human perception did not necessarily mirror reality but also created it ― a work which was to have a tangible influence on Descartes. Very rare. With no UK or US copies and no copy in the Bibliothèque nationale we can locate only two copies in French libraries (Blois and Rouen) and a copy at Ghent. Inventaire chronologique des éditions parisiennes du XVIe siècle, II, Paris, 1977, no 29; Bechtel, Gothiques français, p. 311; Renouard, ICP, II, 29; not in Renouard, Annales de l’imprimerie des Estienne, Paris, 1843. R. Taton, ‘Bovelles et les premiers traités de géométrie en langue française’, Charles de Bovelles. Colloque de Noyon, 1979, Paris, 1982, p. 183-196.

First edition, apparently transcribed from a genuine Middle English original. The title-page notes: ‘The Manuscript to be disposed of. – Apply to the Printer’. pp. 61-70 is an ‘Astronomical and Astrological Appendix’ from a work published in 1647. Caleb Stower (d. 1816) was an interesting and prolific printer with Unitarian connections.

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 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

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, with a large folding plate depicting a planisphere built to desmonstrate the author’s alternative astronomical system.
Demonville had been a printer (son of a printer to the Académie française) but diversified as a maker of globes and 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 systems of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Halley and Herschel. His planispehere demonstrates his alternative cosmos ― with the earth, the sun and the moon the only genuine astronomical bodies (the moon 250 leagues from the earth and the sun just 1500), the earth not rotating (merely ‘nodding’ a little over the course of a year), the stars affixed to a crystalline sphere and the planets with no corporeal existence. Demonville hawked his system around Paris and London (with both his books and instruments), even obtaining an audience with William III, who had to ask the Royal Society for their opinion. With his longitude pamphlets, such as ours, he sought to obtain prizes from the Societies of Paris and London but he was pilloried in the press and his ideas were roundly dismissed.
This pamphlet though here separately issued (with its own title-page and errata leaf forming a wrapper) was also issued simultaneously as a suite to the author’s Question de longitude sur mer (1833). The final 4 leaves are adverts for the author’s controversial mechanical planispheres, one of which is illustrated in the very large folding plate. 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.