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An ingenious calculator aimed at a juvenile audience.

First and only edition of this delightful illustrated gift book, describing the four ages of women and depicting them in a series of elegant hand-coloured plates. The dedication printed in civilité type is to the author’s wife (and mother of his children). The final 10 pages comprise a calendar for 1820 (in common with the V&A copy). Worldcat: V&A and Landesbibliothek Mecklenburg only.

First edition, rare. M. Baboulard is something of a dandy (notably sporting tartan trousers of a type then fashionable in both Britain and France) but he also has a wife and family of seven children and a taxing job in the ministry. Grands déplaisirs à l’occasion d’un train de plaisir is a graphic satire in the mould of Daumier on the aspirations of the newly-leisured middle classes seeking recreation on the railways. Tempted by newspaper advertisments, Baboulard books a trip to Le Havre, only to be assailed by friends and family loading him parcels, packages and a pair of dogs to deliver. The trip turns out to be a holiday from hell, and Baboulard returns to Paris duly chastened. Only one of the plates is signed by Adam, though all are demonstrably his. Among his numerous lithograph collections reflecting the rise of modernity in France this must be one of the rarest and it is especially so in coloured form. Gumuchian, Livres de l’Enfance, I, p.18. Worldcat lists the Bn copy only, there is also a copy in the National Library of Scotland (probably on account of the hero’s tartan trews).

A wonderful toy schoolroom box complete with numerous paper and other accessories: an abacus, miniature chalkboards, steel rule, a steel dipping pen (with box of additional nibs), exercise books (partially completed), drawing book, copybooks, various merit points and certificates for good work, a ribbon rosette and a wire-framed floral crown. The lid illustrates a schoolroom for girls. Educational game manufacturer NK Atlas was founded by Leon Nicolas and Charles Keller at 23 rue Atlas, Paris from around 1900.

A good example of ‘Flecht-schule’ exercises for young girls, in which dexterity, accuracy, patience and creativity were encouraged through intricate pattern weaving in paper. This could be applied to the practical arts of embroidery but had been encouraged as an independent exercise. In addition to the 25 abstract designs here, the final two panels give the maker’s initials ‘L.W.’ and the date ‘1912’.

An attractive portable atlas. A reissue of the plates of the 1790 edition, with the dates altered to ‘Sepr. 1, 1792’ on all of the maps except the map of Yorkshire. Letterpress printed by C. Rickaby, whose name appears at foot of first page.

Second edition (first 1637) of this rare proto-feminist essay, probably first written around 1620 in response to the misogynist pamphlet Hic mulier, or, The Man-Woman. Austin’s title Haec Homo is an epicene (ungendered or binary) construction which joins a female definite article (Haec) with the masculine noun homo (man) to introduce the author’s thesis that men and women share common humanity as well as ‘the same reasonable soule; and, in that, there is neither hees, or shees.’ It was dedicated to ‘Mistress Mary Gifford’ and both first and second editions were issued with an engraved portrait of her, which is lacking in this copy (and in the EEBO copy). The book includes four woodcut illustrations of a ‘Vitruvian woman’. This copy was rebound in the first decades of the nineteenth century by Auguste Marie Comte de Caumont, an aristocratic French emigré who worked as a bookbinder at addresses around Soho, London for more than 20 years from 1790. ‘He is considered a very great binder, in an age when English bookbinding was temporarily at a high level, and actually far ahead of contemporary French binding’ (Ramsden, French Bookbinders 1789-1848, p. 49). This example of his work bears his Gerrard Street address, his final workshop before returning to France around 1814-15. Interestingly there is no evidence that he had experience of bookbinding before leaving France.
STC 975. ESTC: BL (lacks letterpress title), Cambridge (lacks leaf A4 and engraved title), Folger (lacks letterpress title and portrait), LC (lacks letterpress title), Illinois (lacking portrait), Minnesota, Yale.

An attractive Venetian edition by Johannes Tacuinus de Tridino, which, like the first edition of 1499 consists of the first three books on the ‘origin of things’. In this encyclopaedic work, Vergil addresses questions of origins, from the origin of the gods, man and languages to the origin of wine and liqueurs, marriage, magic, medicine, poetry, drama, geography and law. It notably includes an account of the invention of printing, attributing its birth to Peter Schoeffer, rather than Gutenberg.

― An Act for establishing certain Regulations for the better Management of the Affairs of the East India Company, as well in India as in Europe. London: Charles Eyre and William Strahan, 1773. Folio (318 × 195 mm), pp. [2]. 1299-1327, [1] including general title with woodcut royal arms.
― An Act for the better Regulation and Management of the Affairs of the East India Company, and of the British Possessions in India; and for establishing a Court of Judicature for the more speedy and effectual Trial of Persons accused of Offences committed in the East Indies. [London, 1784]. Folio (310 × 195 mm), pp. 351-395, [1]. Without general title.
― An Act for the better Government of India. [2^nd August 1858.] [London: George Edward Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1858]. Folio (301 × 186 mm), pp. [1], 854-874. Woodcut arms to head of first page.
— Indian Independence Act 1947. 10 & 11 Geo. 6. Ch. 30. [London: Sir Norman Gibb Scorgie for HMSO, 1947]. 8vo (235 × 140 mm), pp. [ii], 18, [2]. Stamp ‘Supplied for the Public Service’ to first leaf.

First editions of the three British Parliamentary Acts which shaped the colonial history of India and the Indian Independence Act — the foundation of modern India.

The 1773 act entrusted government of India to the East India Company; the 1784 act established power-sharing between the Company and the British government; and 1857 established direct British rule and the Raj after the rebellion (the so-called ‘Indian Mutiny). ‘The act of 1773, also known as the Regulating Act, set up a governor-general of Fort William in Bengal with supervisory powers over Madras (now Chennai) and Bombay (now Mumbai). Pitt’s India Act (1784), named for the British prime minister William Pitt the Younger, established the dual system of control by the British government and the East India Company, by which the company retained control of commerce and day-to-day administration but important political matters were reserved to a secret committee of three directors in direct touch with the British government; this system lasted until 1858 … The act of 1858 transferred most of the company’s powers to the crown.’ (Britannica). 

‘The [1947 Independence] act created two new independent dominions; India and Pakistan. Pakistan was split into Pakistan and East Pakistan which is now Bangladesh. The Bengal and Punjab provinces were partitioned between the two new countries. These dominions separated the Muslim, Hindu and Sikh population and caused the biggest forced migration which has ever happened that was not the result of war or famine (Parliament UK website).

Though separately published with a general title for a complete sitting of Parliament, individual Acts of Parliament were paginated to be bound together in yearly volumes hence the paginations here. Of the two eighteenth-century acts, only the first retains its general title. All four acts preserved in recent wrappers to style’.

First published in 1819, Le Poupée bien élevée proved popular among children on both sides of the English Channel, with numerous editions in both French and English (the latter as The Well Bred Doll). Jeanne Sophie Mallès de Beaulieu (176-1825) was the author of numerous moral and entertaining stories for children including Le Robinson de douze ans (1820).

A curious copy of this popular edition, removed from its original boards or wrappers at an early date and placed in a board chemise with ties and manuscript labels, perhaps for a personal or circulating library.

First edition of this important attempt at a universal non-sectarian liturgy, inspired by David Williams and Benjamin Franklin’s London Philosophical ‘Club of Thirteen’. It extended Williams’s experiments as minister to a Highgate Presbyterian congregation, reflecting contemporary debates around the Thirty-Nine Articles, and was widely influential notably in France, where it was applauded by both Rousseau and Voltaire.

The Club of Thirteen was a Radical intellectual club, rather like the Birmingham Lunar Society, and its members included Williams, Franklin, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Josiah Wedgwood, Robert Owen, William Hodgson, and Thomas Day. It met at Old Slaughter's Coffee House on St Martin's Lane, or at the Swan at Westminster Bridge.

‘On Easter Sunday, 7 April 1776, Williams opened a chapel in Margaret Street, Cavendish Square, and read from the Liturgy on the Universal Principles of Religion and Morality, the collaborative production of members of the Club of Thirteen... The preface to this universalist Liturgy of 1776 describes the experiment as a form of social worship 'in which all men may join who acknowledge the existence of a supreme intelligence, and the universal obligations of morality' (Liturgy, x–xi). Its format, containing an order for morning and for evening prayer and a collection of hymns and psalms, is reminiscent of an Anglican format, but the liturgy avoids all dogmatic statements of belief beyond an acknowledgement of the wisdom and goodness of a supreme intelligence and the moral obligations of a simple deism that celebrates nature as implying the existence of God. All specifically Christian doctrines of faith are carefully excluded. Copies of the liturgy were sent to Voltaire and Frederick the Great of Prussia, and in Paris in the summer of 1776 Bentley presented a copy to Rousseau. All three responded enthusiastically. Voltaire wrote: It is a great comfort to me, at the age of eighty-two years, to see the tolerance openly teach’d in your country, and the God of all mankind no more pent up in a narrow tract of land. That notable truth was worthy of your pen and of your tongue’ (Oxford DNB). Though quite well-represented in British collections, ESTC lists US copies at Union Theological Seminary and Penn only; Worldcat adds Columbia, Yale and Emory. It is notably scarce in commerce with Rare Book Hub recording no copies at auction.

First edition of the first British act of legislation to deal specifically with the provision of education in England and Wales. It instituted schooling for children between the ages of five and twelve, established local education authorities with defined powers and authorized public money to improve existing schools. Most importantly, it demonstrated a commitment to compulsory provision on a national scale. Introduced by Liberal politician William Forster (and sometimes referred to as ‘Forster’s Act’) it also marks an important milestone in the history of literacy and literature, and has been seen as a primary stimulant of the growth in reading and of popular fiction for a mass market.

First editions of two rare reports to the Directoire by a French journalist who lost his living after the Revolution and who joined a diplomatic mission to Constantinople ― before being captured by the English fleet and imprisoned for four years in Corsica. Moeurs et coutumes des Corses is a highly critical account of the Corsicans and their culture is inscribed to the author’s wife and daughter, who shared his island captivity. Feydel berates the insular character of his captors and the ‘maux affreux et presque désespérés de la nation corse’ whose only hope of salvation could be through lois simples et savantes qu’il tiendra de la force et de la sollicitude’. The frontispiece depicts Corsican brigands in characteristic capes and hoods. Moeurs et coutumes des Corses was reprinted [without the plate] in 1802. The second work is bracingly anti-British and describes England as ‘dernier ennemi de la France’.

Carmine Starace, Bibliografia della Corsica 8300. Outside Europe, Worldcat locates the Yale copy only of Moeurs and no copies of De notre situation.

A striking and moving memorial to a young boy, a vision of a child’s paradise with chromolithograph scrapbook cuttings of birds, horses, children, dancers, flowers and foliage, together with cuttings of hair (some woven). It combines two popular Victorian domestic crafts of hair art and scrapbooking, within an accomplished (but probably also domestic) wooden frame in the gothic style. With it supersized hair-carrying birds dwarfing diminutive dancers this is an inadvertently unsettling piece of Victorian naïve art.

First edition. To relieve prison overcrowding, Lord Sydney favoured finding an alternative place of transportation, rather than the penitentiaries advocated by the prominent social reformer, Jeremy Bentham. In 1784, he sponsored the Transportation Act. Though New South Wales is not mentioned as a destination, it was favoured by Sydney after consulting the testimonies of both Joseph Banks and the mariner Joseph Matra. Initially ruled out on the grounds of its extreme remoteness, in 1786 the British cabinet came to accept Sydney’s recommendation that convicts be transported there. The Act has come to be regarded as the primary document for the British settlement of Australia.

Though separately published with a general title for a complete sitting of Parliament, individual Acts of Parliament were paginated to be bound together in yearly volumes hence the pagination 907-919 here. ESTC N58442 (Lincoln’s Inn and State Library of New South Wales only though copies are under-recorded since they are often catalogued within volumes and sets of the Acts of Parliament.); Ferguson, Bibliography of Australia 3.

A French edition, translated from the German original by Francois Jean Philibert Aubert de Vitry. A series of dialogues addressed to young children (a boy and a girl) aged four and five, emphasising all the essential virtues of parenthood. The attractive aquatint plates were probably issued with the original edition and include several delightful family scenes. The first French edition appeared in 1825 and the date of 1837 for this reprint is taken from the Princeton Cotsen catalogue. cf. Barbier, II 1010; Querard VIII 508-10.

Two rare works, probably both London-printed, by the Chevalier D’Eon — the French diplomat recognised as one of the first openly transgender figures in European print. The Lettres appear here in their second edition, identical to (and swiftly following) the first, but with a new preface, while the Dernières Lettres is in its rare first edition (at least one more followed).
Following a successful military career d’Eon served Louis XV in English diplomacy and espionage from 1762, gathering defence intelligence for a projected French invasion. Living lavishly in London he alarmed the French government, who stopped his pension and sought to recall him to France. He became embroiled in a bitter row with his compatriot Claude Louis François Régnier de Guerchy (1715–1767), who he saw as an interloper on his diplomatic patch. ‘From October 1763 the dispute took a spectacular turn as d’Eon published allegations that Guerchy had tried to poison him. In March 1764, he went further still and published a selection of his diplomatic papers, which heaped ridicule on Guerchy and his allies in France’ (the present Lettres discussed by Burrows, A King’s Ransom). The dispute was an embarrassment to the French, not least because d’Eon successfully brought the matter to the English courts and because it drew attention to the chevalier’s increasingly complex personal life. It was in the wake of this affair that the chevalier went into hiding in Byfleet (Surrey), spending a year disguised as a woman and going by the name of Madame Duval. This trans experiment initiated the period in which, D’Eon lived partly as a woman and became a celebrated figure in London society.

The Dernière lettre is a superb piece of propaganda issued on d’Eon’s behalf appearing after the comte de Guerchy’s death in 1767 and reproducing the last letter sent to him by d’Eon recounting the facts of the poisoning case together with extensive translations from English legal records of the law case as it worked its way, very publicly, through the courts.

This copy is from the library of politician John Baker Holroyd, 1^st Baron Sheffield (1735-1821, friend of Edward Gibbon). ESTC lists only the BL and UL copies of the ‘La Haye’ second edition of Lettres (and notes a separate large paper issue in a handful of copies) and the BL, Harvard and Czartoryski Library (Cracow) copies of Dernière Lettre only.

A popular guide to attracting a [female] lover, providing advice on preparation, likely meeting places and the initial interactions. There are sample dialogues between the two parties, leading to the proffering (and acceptance) of an engagement ring, followed by a formulary of advice for inviting family and friends to a wedding. Success is apparently the only outcome.
It is not certain where or by who this was printed. Hélot, La Bibliothèque bleue en Normandie, 1928, N°137 suggests the imprint is an ‘Adresse fantaisiste énigmatique, employée par P. Chalopin, le bois de la page 3 est bein celui ayant appartenu à cet imprimeur, avec brisure de 4 mm à gauche dans le filet de l'encadrement’. Another account decodes the anagrams ‘‎Lelis, Goderfe, rue de Nemenya’ to reveal Sillé [le-Guillaume, near Le Mans] and the printer Déforge in the rue de Mayenne (J.-P. Epinal, ‘Une famille de libraires à Sillé-le-Guillaume: les Déforge (1771-1846)’, La Province du Maine, 1976/1, p. 44-68).

A RARE ‘PHYSIONOTRACE’ PORTRAIT OF THEODORE SEDGWICK (1746–1813), the American attorney, politician, and jurist who served in elected state government and as a delegate to the Continental Congress, a U.S. representative, and a senator from Massachusetts. He served as President pro tempore of the United States Senate from June to December 1798. He also served as the fourth speaker of the United States House of Representatives. He was appointed to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 1802 and served there for the rest of his life. He died at Boston and he is buried at Stockbridge. A portrait by Gilbert Stuart of c. 1808 is at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Sedgwick studied theology and law at Yale College and though he did not graduate, he continued in his study under attorney Mark Hopkins of Great Barrington. He played a significant role in the abolitionist movement. As a relatively young lawyer, Sedgwick and Tapping Reeve had pleaded the case of Brom and Bett vs. Ashley (1781), an early ‘freedom suit’, in county court for the slaves Elizabeth Freeman (known as Bett) and Brom. Bett (also known as MumBet) was a black slave who had fled from her master, Colonel John Ashley of Sheffield, Massachusetts, because of cruel treatment by his wife. Brom joined her in suing for freedom from the Ashleys. The attorneys challenged their enslavement under the new state constitution of 1780, which held that ‘all men are born free and equal.’ The jury agreed and ruled that Bett and Brom were free. The decision was upheld on appeal by the state Supreme Court. She was the first enslaved African American to file and win a freedom suit in Massachusetts. She marked her freedom by taking the name of Elizabeth Freeman, and chose to work for wages at the Sedgwick household, where she helped raise their several children. She worked there for much of the rest of her life, buying a separate house for her and her daughter after the Sedgwick children were grown. On her death the Sedgwicks buried her at Stockbridge Cemetery in the family plot.

Before the advent of photography the physionotrace was ‘the first system invented to produce multiple copies of a portrait, invented in 1786 by Gilles-Louis Chrétien (1774–1811). In his apparatus a profile cast by a lamp onto a glass plate was traced by an operator using a pointer connected, by a system of levers like a pantograph, to an engraving tool moving over a copper plate. The aquatint and roulette finished engraved intaglio plate, usually circular and small (50 mm), with details of features and costume, could be inked and printed many times’ (Photoconservation.com, sub Printing Processes). The process was introduced to America by Charles Saint-Mémin.

The miniaturist Saint-Mémin (1770-1852) had emigrated from France in 1793 to Switzerland, where he practised as an engraver. Crossing the Atlantic to Canada and then the United States, he established a portrait business in New York with his compatriot Thomas Bluget de Valdenuit (who initially produced the drawings for Saint-Mémin to engrave). When Valdenuit returned to Paris, Saint-Mémin adopted an itinerant practice all over the East Coast states, working variously at Philadelphia, Richmond, Charleston and Burlington. He too returned to France in 1814, having destroyed his drawing apparatus in a symbolic end to a prolific artistic enterprise which produced more than a thousand different portraits of significant figures in American society, including Washington, Revere and Jefferson.