social sciences

First edition of this survey of the fundamental changes made to female education in France between 1879 and 1887, France fundamentally reformed female education, moving from Catholic-dominated, basic instruction to a state-run, secular, and more academic system. Legislation such as the 1880 so-called Camille Sée law, established the first public secondary schools for girls (lycées) to produce educated ‘republican mothers,’ focusing on academic study rather than just needlework. The author was deputy director of the French ministry of public education. He dedicates the book to Camille Sée.

First edition of this rare practical programme for female secondary education. The so-called Duruy Reforms of 1865 instituted a new programme of secondary instruction geared towards practical careers in business and administration. While they also reformed primary education for girls, they did little for their secondary education, as noted in the foreword here by Madame Charles Sauvestre, instutrice. She concludes that the private initiatives are the only way of circumventing this, and the Guide pratique pour les écoles professionnelles de jeunes filles is a brief but complete guide to the practicalities and particularities of secondary schools for girls, starting with budget estimates for their foundation and maintenance. Much of detail is provided by the tables, which include three-year curricula with breakdowns of the necessary subjects, encompassing, letters, sciences, arts, and practical studies. ‘Letters’ comprise literacy in French and other living languages (not Latin), as well as history, geography, cosmography, domestic economy and ethics (religion is absent). ‘Sciences’ include mathematics (especially mental and commercial arithmetic), accounting, botany, zoology and mineralogy. ‘Arts’ include writing, drawing, geometry, ornament, industrial drawing, engraving, painting on porcelain and singing (formal music and panel painting notably absent). ‘Practical studies’ include couture (dressmaking), embroidery, tapestry, artificial flowers, lacemaking and paper crafts. Each of these subjects is broken down further into specific lessons with their place in a termly and weekly timetable divided into hours. A final chapters gives recommendations for the organisation of a library and a list of recommended books and authors. WorldCat: Library of Congress only outside Europe.

First edition, presentation copy, arguing for the proper provision of university education for women. The author surveys recent developments around the world, notably in the United States, where the women’s education movement has been most marked (and citing the Philadelphia medical school and the University of Michigan as examples) and in Great Britain (citing University College, London, Girton and Somerville Colleges at Cambridge and Oxford respectively). WorldCat locates a single copy: Università Bocconi, Milan.

First edition of one of the celebrated French clairvoyant’s earliest and rarest works, in which she reported an angelic appearance at Louis XVI’s tomb and revealed the contents of a tablet of prophecies for the era of the Restoration of the French monarchy. Like Le Normand’s later works it is couched in terms of dreams, predictions and angelic interventions. Marie-Anne Le Normand (1772–1843) was a celebrated (but also notorious) clairvoyant. Famed throughout Europe for her exclusive clientele, she popularised cartomancy and spawned an enormous wave of imitators. At the height of her career she claimed to have advised the likes of Robespierre, Talleyrand, Metternich, the Empress Josephine and the Russian Emperor Alexander; others argued that the whole thing was a sham, and she was frequently arrested, spending several weeks in prison. She is perhaps best remembered today for the cartomancy tarot decks named after her (’Lenormand cards’).
Le Normand was not only successful as a clairvoyant, but as a businesswoman, publisher and bookseller, with most of her works carrying her own imprint (as here) and sold at her shop in the rue de Tournon. At this early date she evidently operated her own press, with the half-title giving an address in nearby rue de Seine. Later works were generally printed for her by other presses. Caillet 6515. WorldCat: British Library only. While there are several copies in French libraries it is apparently absent from the Bibliothèque nationale. Arbour, Dictionnaire des femmes libraires en France, p. 343.

First edition of Le Norman’s predictions issued in the wake of the July Revolution of 1830 and the restoration of the monarchy under Louis Philippe, events welcomed by Le Normand, who saw the ghost of Louis XVI as her protector. Like her previous collections, it consists of accounts of her ‘visions intuitives’ and ‘Révélations politiques, symboliques, prophètiques, somnambulismes etc’. Throughout the nineteenth century, writers and pamphleteers repeated that tale of the ‘Little Red Man’ purported to be from an old folk tale dating back to the creation of the Tuileries Palace (1564) in which Le Petit Homme Rouge (a genie, or ghost) had appeared to the kings and queens living in the palace on the eve of great events, from Catherine de Medici to Napoleon. Here Le Normand uses him to recount the counsel given to Napoleon at Malmaison in 1793, that France could never be a democracy. Chapter five is set at the Scottish royal palace of Holyrood where the deposed Charles X had lived between 1796-1803
The title verso has an advert for eleven works hitherto published and still marketed by Le Normand at her shop in rue de Torunon, all priced, together with three fothcoming works ‘sous presse’ and a collected works in 10 volumes. Caillet 6514 (’Ouvrage peu commun’).

First edition of this very rare early satire on fashionable French hairstyles (’carcassières’), with four engraved plates showing forty-four styles, including ‘à la belle Fleur’, ‘à la Papillon’, ‘à la Juive’, ‘à la Pompadour’, ‘à la Sultane’, ‘à l’Esclavage’ and ‘à la Parisienne’. It is an especially early catalogue, predating by two years the celebrated Art de la coiffure des dames françaises by celebrity hairdresser, Legros de Rumigny.
Though the illustrations depict genuine hairstyles, the text reveals itself as a bitter satire on the loss of French prestige after the Treaty of Paris, in which France lost almost all its North American territories. It seems to suggest that despite all this, France can still hold its head high in terms of its pre-eminence in fashion. Marchand ironically proposes a wall built along the length of the St Lawrence river, so that all the young Iroquoises can be crimped only by the French. Appended is a hair-themed comedy, La Fille degoutée which Gay called ‘assez libre’. The book had the distinction of being placed on the Index of prohibited books in the Austro-Hungarian empire (the Catalogus librorum a commissione aulica prohibitorum issued by Court Committee of book censorship in Vienna. Cohen-De Ricci 346 (noting the Duke of Sussex copy in the Ferdinand Rothschild collection). WorldCat lists no copies outside Europe.

Presumed first or sole edition of this bilingual English-Japanese picture book showing the costumes of men and women of the various ranks of orders of Japanese society. It includes aristocratic and military subjects, as well as servants, scholars, labourers and craftspeople. The English preface states ‘These books are not only designed to please children, but to show the manners and customs of the ancient and modern people of Nippon. The fine illustrations afford an important aid in this respect. It is through the eye that understanding itself is most quickly reached’.
It was printed by the Poole Women’s College in Osaka. Arthur William Poole, after whom the Osaka Women’s School was renamed in 1890, was the first Anglican Bishop of Japan. The school had been founded as the Church Missionary Society school and its head teacher from 1890 to 1928 was the Durham-born missionary educator, Katherine Tristram, one of the early female graduates of the University of London. When she was appointed ‘there were at the school two other British women apart from Tristram, as well as eight Japanese teachers, including four women, and there were forty-nine pupils, of whom twenty-three were Christians’ (Oxford DNB).

The first recognition of the United States by a foreign power was an unexpected event on the Dutch West Indian island of Sint Eustatius --- in the form of a cannon salute fired on 16 November 1776 from the island’s Fort Orange in response to the salute of the American ship Andrew Doria. Taking place just a few months after the United States Declaration of Independence, it is remembered in American history as ‘The First Salute’. A major slave colony and trading hub, Sint Eustatius was used by the Americans during the Revolution as a staging post for importing arms and other goods, in defiance of British embargoes. Guns and gunpowder were exchanged for colonial goods such as sugar and cotton. This illicit trade, and the refusal of Dutch authorities to take action against it, naturally angered Great Britain, as it violated prior Anglo-Dutch treaties. On 16 November 1776, the American Andrew Doria visited the harbour of Sint Eustatius to load weapons and ammunition. It was the first American ship flying the new American flag (the Continental Union Flag) to enter the harbour. Governor Johannes de Graaff ordered that the ship be received with full honours, and after the Andrew Doria fired a salute in greeting, he commanded that it be returned with salutes from Fort Orange. Once docked, he hosted a celebration for the captain and invited all Americans on the island. The Americans accepted the salute as the first recognition of the United States by a foreign power.
The event created a diplomatic storm, with strenuous protest coming from Great Britain, who sent their ambassador General Joseph Yorke with a memorandum of complaint to the Dutch States General. The present document is the official Dutch record of the events at Sint Eustace and their response to Yorke and the British government. This resolution is one of the earliest printed governmental acknowledgments in Europe that an American-flagged vessel had received the salute from a foreign power. The first paragraphs recount the event briefly, before the Estates addressed the British grievances in conciliatory terms, insisting that a full enquiry would take place and that governor De Graaf would be summoned in person to make a full account of his extions. Their response was transmitted to the British and recorded in full in the Annual Register for 1777 (p. 291). In the event, Anglo-Dutch relations were to deteriorate beyond repair, to the extent that in 1780 the British recaptured the island from the Dutch, having declared war (The Fourth Anglo-Dutch War).
Like other Extracts from the Estates General this is a separately-issued report, almost certainly printed at the Hague. It was designed to be folded into octavo size for distributuon, with a printed title panel facing outward for convenient identification and filing. WorldCat lists the KB Netherlands copy only.

A splendid bibliophilic caricature. ‘The bouquiniste in pleasure’ shows a crouching bookseller, his sleeves made of reused book-covers, offering a variety of books to a voracious bibliophile, whose pockets are already stuffed with treasures. The print is signed simply ‘XX’ but is attributed to Auger by the Bibliographie de France of 1817. Adrien-Victor Auger (1787-1854) had been a student of David, he exhibited at the Salons of 1810, 1824 and 1834 and satirised fashionable Paris society through his lively engraved and lithographed prints.

’One of the most elaborate jokes ever perpetuated in the form of a University magazine’ (Marillier). The first two parts (of three) of this exceptionally rare satirical magazine issued in 1870 on the occasion of the passing of the Universities Test Acts. These acts abolished religious ‘Tests’ and for the first time allowed Roman Catholics, non-conformists and non-Christians to take up professorships, fellowships, studentships and other lay offices at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Durham.
Edited pseudonymously by ‘Hadji Seivad and a talented Heather Staff’, the magazine combined familiar university in-jokes with a satirical reflection of popular opinion. Carrying a publication date twenty years after the fact it pretended to reflect on changes brought about by this landmark cultural legislation.
‘Twenty short years ago the waters of education flowed in that one narrow channel that men called Christianity. The day has come when the professors of an effete and obsolete faith have dwindled to a mere handful, and the time may not be far distant when even these shall pass away from among us - when every man shall be to himself his own measure, his own guide, and his own faith. We need only point, to show that we do not boast unmeasuredly, to the grand Mussulman foundation that has taken the place of the worn-out Christian Asylum of Trinity College - to the settlement of Red Indians who occupy Downing College - to the Aborigines of Queens’ - the Cossacks of Magdalen - the Fire-eaters of Sidney, and similar foundations, in proof of the Cosmopolitan character that we have now assumed. Hand in hand with this advance has gone the Sister scheme of FEMALE EDUCATION...’
A recent reading sees through the satire and comments: ‘Prophesying over the arrival of non-white, non-Christian students “twenty short years” ahead, this three-issue journal (1870–1871) was used to denounce national, racial, religious and gender diversity as a threat to the British character of Cambridge. The first issue portrayed a cosmopolitan Cambridge crew that would win a fictional interuniversity regatta against an Oxford team despite their blatant incompetence (Loïc Folton, ‘Rowing as a Site of Cross-Cultural Encounters: South-Asian Students at Oxbridge, 1870s-1940s’ (Global Histories, Vol. 9, No. 1, November 2023, pp. 23-40.) Marillier, Harry Currie, University Magazines and their Makers, 1899, p. 35. Worldcat: Cambridge (Trinity) and Delaware only (both complete in three issues). LibraryHub adds copies at the UL and St John’s, Cambridge.

A scarce American edition of this abridgment of Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and belles lettres (London and Edinburgh, 1783). One of the most widely published schoolbooks in early nineteenth-century America, individual imprints can be surprisingly scarce, as with this Northampton issue. The contemporary American binding bears impressions of five different binders’ roll tools, presumably made as trials on a portion of sheepskin before it was reused for a binding. Shaw & Shoemaker 43383.

First published in 1738, Soumille’s illustrated guide to trictrac (a variant of the game of backgammon) was reprinted several times in the eighteenth century, the present 1756 edition probably being the second (another edition appeared at Avignon in the same year). This copy contains a delightful contemporary first person ex libris inscription giving voice to the book itself:
‘je suis a qui je suis, a autre ne veut être, et si perdut je suis promtement je veux être remit a qui je suis Alexandre est mon maïtre’. (’I belong to who I belong to; I do not wish to belong to another, and if I am lost, I want to be promptly returned to the one I belong to. Alexandre is my master.’) Barbier II, 565.

First published in 1766 and memorably called ‘that vivacious compost of obscenity and adventure’ (Charles Whibley, 1898) Le Compère Matthieu proved to be among the most popular satirical ‘philosophical novels’ of the ancien régime. As frequently suppressed as it was republished, it makes a strong showing among confiscations tabulated in the Robert Darnton’s Corpus of Clandestine Literature in France 1769-1789. Strongly materialist, anti-establishment and anticlerical it was wrongly (if understandably) attributed to Voltaire. It continued to be published after the Revolution, but no longer surreptitiously and the present edition (often referred to as the best) is known in elegant large papier vélin copies like the present, with the rather gothic plates avant la lettre. The fine binding is by Bozerian le Jeune (Virgil François Bozerian 1765-1826) perhaps the finest and certainly the most emblematic bookbinders of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, who notably produced several hundred bindings for the French Imperial Library. This copy was in the library of Claude-Auguste Genard (1819–1908) of Grenoble, then that of New York collector (and early Grolier Club member) Frederic Robert Halsey (1847-1918). The Huntington Library purchased the Halsey library en bloc in 1915, but sold many duplicates or other unwanted volumes. Cohen-De Ricci, 336: ‘Les exemplaires in-8, sur papier vélin avec les figures avant la lettre sont recherchés’.

A satirical plate directed against the Scottish financier John Law, the financial disaster of the Mississippi company, and his failed bank note scheme in France. Law is referred to as ‘M. Quinquenpoix’, alluding to the location of the headquarters of Compagnie des Indes in rue Quinquempoix, Paris. The satirical portrait is laced with allegory. Law holds a distinctly phallic money bag, from which emerge the words ‘Aut Cesar aut nihil’ (Be Caesar or Nothing), while a fool crowns him and a indigenous American in a feathered headdress holds a medallion with image of Icarus and Daedalus; various diabolical figures feed the flames of a bonfire with banknotes and share certificates, while Law is boiled alive in a cauldron. The French verses recount Law’s disastrous Mississippi scheme.
The print is known in several contemporary impressions and piracies. Examples in both Dutch and French appeared in the satirical Het Groote Tafereel Der Dwaasheid and its supplement (Amsterdam, 1720). A later French version is known with the allegorical portrait reversed and in a much weaker impression, appearing in Mémoires de la Régence de S.A.R. Mgr le Duc d’Orléans 1729 (vol. 2, page 327). An example of this later print is included here for comparison. BM Satires 1612 (noting several variants of the two plates); Hennin, Estampes relatives à lHistoire de France, 7788

First edition with the English text of the Preparatoirlyk plan, van een tractaat van commercie (Plan of a Treaty of Commerce) projected between Holland and the United States. Though never concluded it is important as one of the earliest treaty negotiations by the American nation after the Revolution. The plan had been secretly negotiated at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1778 between William Lee, American commissioner to Berlin and Jean de Neufville, an Amsterdam banker professing to act on behalf of the city and was to be concluded when England acknowledged America as a free nation. A detailed treaty it contains thirty four articles outlining terms of trade between the two nations, and the form of passports and certificates for ships. It is subscribed Jean de Neufville and Samuel W. Stockton, the American lawyer, diplomat and public servant who was later to serve as Secretary of State of New Jersey from 1794 to 1795. It is followed by transcriptions (also in Dutch and English) of the associated diplomatic correspondence. An edition of the Dutch text only appeared also in 1780 which Sabin (65110) refers to as the ‘Original edition’, though it is not clear on what basis.
The draft was inadvertently made public in 1780 when the vessel in which the bearer of it, Henry Laurens, South Carolina merchant, planter, and revolutionary leader who served as President of the Continental Congress from 1777 to 1778 was apprehended at sea by the English. The Plan was found among the effects he threw overboard on his capture and Laurens was imprisoned for treason. The treaty was not strictly illegal, but the British Government was able to construe it and other retrieved papers detailing Dutch financial aid to the rebellious American colonies as being equivalent to actual aggression. Although it was neither authorised nor sanctioned by the States-General nor by Congress, it served as a pretext for England’s declaration of war against the Netherlands.
It was handed to the Dutch Estates General by the British Ambassador, General Joseph Yorke, debated and published here as one of the Extracts of the resolutions of the Estates General of the Netherlands. Sabin 63286: ‘Official edition of the Preparatory Plan’ (projected 1778 at Aix-la-Chapelle), with the correspondence relating to it, as it was presented by the Chev. Yorke, as found with the papers of Mr. Laurens, to the Prince of Orange, and sent by the States General to the Provinces. The subscription of the Treaty is changed in all the reproductions — Müller’. Cf. Sabin 65110 for the original Dutch edition (two editions, also 1780).

Two very rare legal mémoires, relating a particularly involved and scandalous French adultery case, with a contemporary letter from the comtesse de Bragelongne, one of the named parties,
The Sieur de Pelletot (a notorious adulterer) had accused his wife Elisabeth (née Planström) of undue intimacy with the comte de Bragelongne and had both arrested and imprisoned, seeking to gain control of his wife’s dowry. The two printed documents are the texts of each of their counter suits made against Pelletot for his libellous accusations. It was an extraordinary case, not least because of the identity of Pelletot’s wife, Elisabeth Planström, who had grown up in the Torne Valley of Lapland (a marginal manuscript note to the first mémoire provides a brief biography. She had encountered the French scientists Maupertuis and Clairault while they were conducting their famous survey expedition around the Arctic circle to establish the shape of the earth. Elisabeth and her sister Christine, both young women, followed the scientists back to France and settled in Paris, with Christine entering holy orders and Elisabeth marrying the comte de Pelletot. She endured his abuse and serial adultery until their divorce in 1761, when she was imprisoned and Pelletot attempted to gain control of her considerable dowry. Pelletot had accused his wife of infidelity with the comte de Bragelongne. Protracted legal processes ensued, and in 1763 the Parlement of Paris ruled in favour of both Elisabeth and de Bragelongne, who were released from prison, their seized property returned, and all defamatory statements suppressed. Pelletot was condemned to pay damages, cover all legal costs, and formally acknowledge the falsity of his accusations.
The two printed memoranda are accompanied by an impassioned letter (quite probably autograph) from Bragelongne’s wife, the comtesse de Bragelongne, in which she bitterly regrets her husband’s treatment at the hands of Pelletot which has turned their family’s fortunes upside-down. It is addressed to the duchesse de Choiseul, with a plea for her to ask of the duc de Choiseul a position for de Bragelongne in the administration of the French colony of Cayenne, so that the family may make a fresh start. It is possible that she attached or enclosed the printed mémoires with her letter. Together, the three documents recount one of the most extraordinary matrimonial trials of the French ancien regime. WorldCat: Mémoire pour le comte de Bragelongne contre le sieur de Pelletot, Bn only; Mémoire pour la dame de Planstrôm de Pelletot, no copies located.

A popular pocket dream dictionary abridged from Vulson de la Colombière’s influential Le Palais des curieux first published in 1660 and widely disseminated in popular form. The foot of the final page includes a series of numbers offered as the most likely to be drawn in the national lottery. René Helot, La Bibliothèque bleue en Normandie (1928). 12

Velcurio’s popular textbook of Aristotelian physics, printed at Lyon by Louis Cloquemin and Étienne Michel, here with an early English binding and provenance.

Johannes Velcurio or Johannes Bernhardi of Feldkirch (1490-1534) was professor of rhetoric and physics at the university of Wittenberg, where he was a humanist colleague of Melanchthon. This posthumously published Commentarium on Aristotle’s physics first appeared in Tubingen in 1542 and ran to at least twenty five editions before 1595, including those from in Basel, Erfurt, Cologne, Tübingen, Strasbourg, Wittenberg, Lyon, and London. The fourth book is devoted to Aristotle’s De anima. In England, as elsewhere it was used as a university textbook and appears, for example, among the small textbooks purchased by students at Cambridge (see P. Gaskell, Books bought by Whitgift’s Pupils in the 1570s, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 7, 3 (1979), pp. 284-293). It is unclear who the ‘John Freeman’ who inscribed the title-page in Greek at an early date was, but several John Freemans appear in the Cambridge University registers in the last years of the sixteenth century.

The binding bears identical blindstamped centrepiece tools to a contemporary London binding illustrated by David Pearson in English Bookbinding Styles 1450-1800 as Fig 3.35 (BL 1492.f.43, Selneccer, Evangeliorum et epistolarum dominicalium, Frankfurt, 1575) with similar spine bands and blind-ruled borders. At the front and rear are two endleaves (each) using waste apparently from an unidentified edition of Justinian’s Institutes, each with further early notes (mainly pen tests).

First edition, much extending and improving Smart’s earlier work of 1707, Tables of simple Interest and Discount. Dedicated to the governor or the Bank of England, William Thompson, his deputy, Humphrey Morice and the bank’s directors, they proved to be among the most used tables of interest of the eighteenth century. There were two further printings in 1747 and 1780. Included are tables of simple and compound interest, discount as well as tables to calculate the value of annuities on lives and numerous worked examples of their use. It concludes with a survey of the history of British currency and coinage, which includes consideration of unlawful usury and coin clipping, as well as other legal considerations. In the 1707 Tables of simple Interest and Discount Smart described himself as of ‘the Town Clerk’s office, London’, whereas by 1726 he could describe himself as ‘of Guildhall, Gent.’ Other sources show he was Clerk to H. M. Commissioners of Lieutenancy for the City of London, 1714-1739, and Deputy Town Clerk until his death in 1742. Of Tables of Interest, Discount, Annuities, McCulloch wrote in his 1871 Dictionary of Commerce: ‘They are carried to 8 decimal places, and enjoy the highest character, both here and on the Continent, for accuracy and completeness. The original work is now become very scarce.’ The work also holds a significant place in the history of actuarial science, since he noted in his discussion of annuities the need for accurate tables of mortality and the systematic recording of ages of death by parish clerks (p. 113), a recommendation that was soon adopted for bills of mortality, at least in London.

The owner of this copy, Thomas Best (1753-1815), was part of the wealthy Best brewing family of Kent, was educated at Eton and Cambridge, and became an officer in the West Kent militia. Goldsmiths’ 6485; Kress 3666.

A rare and outlandish canard depicting a winged harpie, with the caption ‘Ce monstre afreux son corps est de la force d’un taureau / d’un an il a vingt deux pieds de longueur’.
This is a version of several contemporary ‘Peruvian monster’ prints issued as satirical allusions to Marie Antoinette, who was widely accused of accused of rapaciously squandering the royal treasury. They were inspired by a pamphlet of 1784 titled Description historique d’un monstre symbolique pris vivant sur les bords du lac Fagua près de Santa Fé par les soins de Francisco Xaveiro de Meunrios, comte de Barcelone — the pseudonym Francisco Xaveiro de Meunrios probably referring to Louis Stanislas Xavier, Count of Provence, Louis XVI’s brother. Harpie prints then appeared in considerable number (the Bibliothèque nationale holds at least thirteen, most printed in Paris, a number of which are dated to 1784) and were popular in both Paris and other French cities. Not found in WorldCat or among the similar prints in the BnF.