Search

First edition, inscribed by the author’s father to Edmund Gosse of this posthumous novel by Toru Dutt (1856-1877), Indian poet, translator, and novelist. Dutt was born in Calcutta and received her early education there, both in Indian and European languages, under the encouragement of her mother and father (the latter a colonial administrator). ‘In 1869, when she was aged thirteen, and at a time when conservative Hindus believed that crossing the ‘black waters’ was blasphemous, the Dutt family travelled by sea to Europe. Toru and her elder sister Aru were the first Bengali girls to dare such a transgression’ (Chandani Lokugé in ODNB). Toru studied French in Nice and Paris, and English in London and Cambridge. On returning to India she continued her reading of French and British Romantics such as Hugo, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley as well as the Brontës and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She also began an intensive course of study in Sanskrit, while at the same time adapting her new knowledge to retell legends from the Mahabharata in English, using traditional English poetic forms. She died of consumption in 1877 at the age of just twenty-one, by which time she had written four books, of which only one, A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields (1876), was published in her lifetime.

The novel Le Journal de Mademoiselle d’Arvers, was set in Brittany, France, and was published only posthumously. ‘The manuscript, hand-copied by Govin Chunder, was sent to Clarisse Bader, who contributed a foreword, and with whose assistance it was published by Didier in Paris in 1879 and included in the Librarie Académique’. It was an ‘exciting hybrid between the nineteenth-century European gothic romance and the realist genres, and can be read as the creative experiment by a talented novice writer inspired by her reading of European literature’ (Lokugé).

For Western readers, as both a young woman and as an Indian writing in English, a great deal of the interest in Toru Dutt’s poetry was due to her familiarity with English and French literature. Edmund Gosse was an enthusiastic patron and wrote: ‘it would seem that the marvellous facilities of Toru’s mind still slumbered, when, in her thirteenth year, her father decided to take his daughters to Europe to learn English and French. To the end of her days Toru was a better French than English scholar. She loved France best, she knew its literature best, she wrote its language with more perfect elegance.’ (Ancient Ballads, xii). Worldcat lists copies at BL and University of Manitoba only outside continental Europe.

First edition of this rousing patriotic endorsement of French manufactures, with its invocation of the might of the king, on the eve of the Revolution. A ‘France First’ manifesto, it insists on the primacy of French metalwork, silks, and cloth — pointing out that women could demonstrate their patriotism by renouncing plain white mousseline dresses (from Eastern sources). It insists on domestic linen manufacture, which could be a source of employment for sixty thousand people and on the imposition of means-related taxation. Peddling (‘colportage’) or other unregulated trade is to be strictly forbidden. It is signed at the end ‘R..... patriote’. Worldcat: UCB, Newberry, Harvard and Toronto in North America.

First edition, with author’s signature at the end of the preface and with various small manuscript corrections, presumably editorial. An exhaustive proposal for a post-Revolutionary national bank based on property the title bears Mengin’s statement his aim: ‘Fonder l’intérêt public sur l’intérêt particulier, les concilier pour l’avantage général de tous ces citoyens, multiplier les richesses nationales, tel est l’unique but de cet ouvrage’ (‘Basing the public interest on private interest, reconciling them for the general advantage of all citizens, multiplying national wealth, such is the sole aim of this work)’. The folding tables include models for four different credit notes: Papier rouge, papier bleu, papier jaune and papier vert.

A rare publisher’s advert for a short-lived satirical almanac devoted to the comic lowlife of the Parisian Latin Quarter, with its famously hedonistic students and lorettes courtesans or sex workers). The lorette emerged both in reality and in the popular imagination during the July Monarchy (1830-48), named after the Right Bank church of Notre Dame de Lorette where they were thought to reside and the almanac promises a range of playful gender inverting fun based on the ‘Vésuviennes’ (popular heroines of the 1848 revolution who donned uniform and took to the barricades) including the confessions of a Vésuvienne and their ‘Charte-Constitution’.
During the February Revolution of 1848, French women briefly hoped for political rights and an improvement in their social situation. Such hopes were short-lived and popular reaction was expressed in satires like this. The complex image of the Vésuvienne woman warrior, both pleasantly seductive and scandalously rebellious. She appeared in all the major newspapers, while real women in the streets claimed this title by parading under a Vesuvian banner. Their morality was often called into question and it is no surprise to see lorettes and Vésuviennes share a billing here. In Belhomme’s lithograph, three lorettes step out of basket (one thumbing her nose); a reflection of a popular contemporary song ‘Le Panier aux lorettes’.

First edition of the last book by a prolific French clairvoyant — in the form of a decree from the gods of Mount Olympus, this is a spirited plea in favour of the Duchesse de Berry then imprisoned for leading a rebellion against Charles X after the July Revolution. Like Le Normand’s other works it is couched in terms of dreams, predictions and angelic interventions. It bears her signature on the back of the half-title as a measure against piracy and the frontispiece shows her taking the Duchesse’s hand in prison, as an angel swoops down to crown her.

Marie-Anne Le Normand (1772–1843) was a celebrated (or notorious) clairvoyant, publisher, booskeller and self-publicist 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 Emperor Alexander himself; others argued that the whole thing was a sham, and she was frequently arrested, spending several weeks in prison.

A rare broadside offering a proposal to put the poor (’Beggars, or idle stroling persons’) to work in the making of sail-cloth in a workhouse ‘to be built, in some convenient Place near the River Thames, within five Miles of London, to be managed by Governors, Gratis, in the Nature of St. Thomas’s’ Hospital.’ Its anonymous author notes ‘That... many Thousands of Men, Women, and Children are daily stroling about these great Cities of London and Westminster, without Employment, and having found, by Begging and Pilfering, an easier Way of Maintenance, than by Working, do initiate and train up their Children therein, as if it was a lawful Trade: Insomuch that they are become insolent, and often disturb People in the Streets and Houses by Day, and render them unsafe by Nights...’

The item appears in Wing ( L1366A) which suggests 1697 as an unlikely date of publication. It is more likely to date from c. 1731 when an ‘Act for Further Encouraging the Manufacture of British Sail Cloth’ was passed in Parliament — the broadside’s author notes the the Commons have recently considered methods of encouraging the manufacture of sail-cloth. Goldsmiths’-Kress no. 06901.1.

First published in Latin in 1520, this is considered the first ethnographic compendium of the Early Modern period in Europe, a collection of the manners and customs of all mankind, as it was then known to most Europeans. It considers Africa, Asia and Europe. It first appeared in French in 1540. Its first appearance in English was as William Waterman’s The Fardle of Facions in 1555 and it was printed in forty-seven editions between 1535 and 1620. British Library and Bibliothèque nationale only in WorldCat. Atkinson, La Littérature géographique fraņçaise de la Renaissance: répertoire bibliographique (Paris, 1927), n° 73.

A large and full album containing accomplished watercolours and a selection of contemporary prints.
The original drawings and watercolours here (together with the more significant prints) display a distinctly romantic sensibility, with mountain and lakeland scenes (and more than a hint of the cult of the sublime) and other rural subjects of cottages and cottagers. Some of the views are obviously of Britain, while others are continental (specifically alpine). The majority are unsigned, though a number are by the same very accomplished amateur hand, with others by less schooled, perhaps juvenile hands. The whole assemblage is typical of the culture of early Victorian album- and scrapbook keeping, where a female compiler (often a mother) brought together contributions from family, friends and visitors, sometimes recording their travels, but including also subjects painted at home or copied or adapted from other sources. In the latter category are found a fine series of flower paintings, together with drawings in pencil and crayon of animals, a female reader, a cottager with a bundle of firewood, and so on. The principal artist, who contributes the largest and best watercolour views may well be identifiable as Mary Leighton, née Parker (1799-1864), a northern British artist whose work is represented in a sequence of albums closely comparable to ours at the Yale Center for British Art (MSS 16). Not only is the range of materials of our album similar in each case (including watercolour contributions from Leighton’s brother, John Parker) but the style of the best watercolours is close to those by Leighton (examples of here work are digitised by the YCBA, notably the watercolour of Lake Maggiore catalogued as B2009.9.68 in the Printed and Drawings collection, together with others in the V&A collection in London). A recent northern provenance for the album further supports that likelihood.
The contents include:
Six fine watercolours of rural scenes (one mountainous, another captioned ‘Cottage. From nature’), several other sepia watercolour views, probably by the same hand. All unsigned.
Pencil drawing, Warwick Castle, signed ?C.W.W. May 29^th, 1821.
Twelve watercolours of flowers and fruit (including sweet peas, auricula, a rose, geranium, fuchsia and two mixed bouquets). Unsigned.
Silhouette portrait (perhaps a self portrait) of the prolific society silhouettist Auguste Édouart (1789-1861), signed, 1831, mounted on an elaborate lithograph background, plus one other silhouette without background, possibly also his work.
Two watercolour miniatures (85 × 115 mm) by John Parker (1798-1860) of mountain views in North Wales: Trevaen (Tryfan) and Snowdon (Yr Wyddfa), signed, dated 1824 and with manuscript descriptions on versos.
A circular miniature (diameter 85 mm) in sepia wash of a woodland grotto scene, mounted on a bifolium with manuscript caption in German dated 1818 signed Rösel, the miniature attributable to Johann Gottlob Samuel Rösel (1768-1843).
Four large alpine engravings/lithographs (Montblanc, Hospice de Grimsel, Hospice du St Bernard, Chamounix), elaborately hand-coloured.
Numerous usually smaller pencil or crayon drawings, including rural or cottage scenes, animals (a pig and a donkey), marine scenes, children at play, a girl reading etc. In several hands of different competence.
Larger prints include: ‘The Late King’ (Hullmandel, after 1830); ‘Oaklands near Newnham, Gloucestershire’ (Haghe, ?c. 1830s); ‘Rev. Richard Raikes’ [founder of the Sunday School movement] (Hullmandel, n.d.); ‘The Thames Tunnel’ [Harding/Dixie, hand-coloured lithograph, c. 1835]; ‘L’Ingrat’ (Hullmandel, after 1832); ‘Kossynier : Sensenträger’ (Warsaw, c. 1830); ‘Ilfracombe, from Lantern Hill’ (Day & Haghe, c. 1830). There also several smaller lithographs including series of seaside views in Devon (Ilfracombe) and East Kent (Ramsgate and evirons, some locally printed.
Four small continental devotional prints, two with moveable flaps, one metallic.
(From the YCBA catalogue record): Mary Leighton, née Parker, 1799-1864 was the third child of Thomas Netherton Parker (1771-1848) and his wife, Sarah. Her parents must have encouraged their children's creative pursuits, as Mary and her elder brother John both became accomplished amateur artists. Their family was close friends of the Ladies of Llangollen, Eleanor Charlotte Barker (1739-1829) and Sarah Ponsonby (1755-1832), two upper-class Irish women who fled their families and established a home together in North Wales, at Plas Newydd, only fifteen miles from the Parker family estate, Sweeney Hall. Correspondence between Sarah Parker and Sarah Ponsonby, currently in the Denbighshire Record Office archives, reveals that Mary occasionally sent the ladies her drawings, many of which record the grounds of Plas Newydd and the surrounding countryside. The subjects of Mary's drawings also include prominent Grand Tour sites, satirical treatments of contemporary fashions, and thoughtful portraits of friends and family. Notably, the only portrait from life of the Ladies of Llangollen is by Mary's hand. Mary remained an active amateur artist following her 1832 marriage to Baldwin Leighton, 7th Baronet (1805-1871), of Loton Hall. Together they had six children, who Mary actively encouraged in drawing and painting. 

Smith’s Wealth of Nations had first appeared in French in 1778-9 in an anonymous translation, followed by a second by Jean-Louis Blavet in 1781. Roucher’s translation first appeared in four volumes in 1790-1. Jean-Antoine Roucher (1745–94) was a poet from Montpellier, friend and admirer of J.-J. Rousseau. He welcomed the Revolution, but was arrested in the Terror and went to the guillotine. Rochedieu 304; Goldsmiths 14106; Kress B, 1986. K. E. Carpenter, The Dissemination of The Wealth of Nations in French and in France, New York, 2002, pp. 85-87.

A scarce Irish imprint from the central Irish town of Mullingar, with a list of some 95 subscribers, mostly of the local gentry, aristocracy, clergy and medical profession. Cheyne’s popular work was first published in 1724 as An Essay of Health and long Life. The Life of the Author had in fact appeared as an appendix to Cheyne’s English Malady (1733) and includes a lengthy and fascinating account of his own experience of obesity and depression.

Including this early title, ESTC lists twelve Mullingar impressions, all printed by Kidd in the 1780s and 90s (and he continued printing into the nineteenth century). ESTC locates several British and Irish holdings but only the University of British Columbia in North America.

A popular Épinal print by the firm first established in 1860 as Pinot & Sagaire, later (1872) just ‘Pinot’. Founded by François Charles Pinot (1817-1874), who had joined the Pellerin firm in 1847 and left in 1860 to found the rival firm, the Imagerie Pinot & Sagaire, or Nouvelle Imagerie d’Epinal.

First edition to contain the engraved frontispiece and title. Marked ‘troisième édition’ on the title-page, this edition, is actually the fourth — following the edition printed privately (in just 25-40 copies) in 1823 and the first two trade editions of 1824. The illustrated edition is considerably rarer (at least in commerce) than the preceding two trade editions (and the true first virtually unobtainable). The plate shows Ourika at the moment of realisation of her isolation and her fate in white European society. Ourika, based on fact, and influenced by Rousseau and Chateaubriand, is the complex story of a black African child, bought (some said rescued) from the slave trade and raised in aristocratic circles in Revolutionary France. It is the first fully developed attempt to portray a black heroine in Europe and the first French novel with a black female narrator. It proved controversial from the start and remains so. On the one hand it has been interpreted as a compassionate account of both racial and female alienation (Duras certainly projects her own experience onto that of her heroine) while on the other it has been described as a sustained act of appropriation and even as an apology for slavery. Whatever is the case, it caused a sensation with the first trade edition of 1824 becoming a bestseller and later editions very widely read in France and further afield (with early translations into English, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish and Danish).

First editions of two rare satires purporting to offer spectacles for the short-sighted. Other than that the two works couldn’t be more different, both in tone or content.

The most significant is the Lunette pour une vuë courte apparently almost unrepresented in European or American library collections. Pseudonymous (’by a northern optician’) and with a false St Petersburg imprint it is a virulent rebuttal of the natural philosophy of Jean-Baptiste Robinet, encyclopédiste and proto-evolutionist. The work under the satirist’s lenses is Robinet’s Vue philosophique de la gradation naturelle des formes de l’étre (Amsterdam, 1768) in which the author had expounded part of his theory of the advance of nature via an active principle common to all forms, from stones to complex plants and animals. Like several other Enlightenment precursors Robinet contributed to the history of evolutionary thought later crystallised by Darwin. He envisaged links between all natural forms, only temporarily invisible, all subject to an active process of refinement and development. Our Lunetier-satirist was having none of it and dismissed the work as a tissue of bizarre dreams and a monstrous production that could only be dismissed by humour. In particular he singles our for ridicule Robinet’s discussions of shells which seem imitate female genitalia (Concha veneris) and fossil stones (priapolites) resembling the male.

The other work is a cautionary and resolutely anti-feminst verse romp through the perils facing the modernday Everyman (’Quidam’) in Paris where the vices of women lurk at every corner to ensnare him. No copy of Lunette pour une vuë courte, ou Bagatelle historico-physico-morale llocated in Worldcat. Lunettes a éclaircir la vue: Gay II, 921.

First edition, first issue with all the first issue points called for by Dufour: the erroneous spelling of the author as ‘Jaques’, the accent to ‘conformé’ added in manuscript the publisher on p. 11, the three cancels (pp. LXVII-LXVIII, 111-112, and 139-140) and the final leaf with instructions to the binder for placing the cancels.

The Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men, also commonly known as the ‘Second Discourse’ examined social inequality and its origins and was Rousseau’s entry in a competition by the Academy of Dijon. Rousseau sets out to demonstrate how the growth of civilization corrupts man’s natural happiness and freedom by creating artificial inequalities of wealth, power and social privilege. Contending that primitive man was equal to his fellows, Rousseau believed that as societies become more sophisticated, the strongest and most intelligent members of the community gain an unnatural advantage over their weaker brethren, and that constitutions set up to rectify these imbalances through peace and justice in fact do nothing but perpetuate them. Rousseau’s political and social arguments in the Discourse were a hugely influential denunciation of the social conditions of his time and one of the most revolutionary documents of the eighteenth-century.

The inscription ‘F.H. Bothe’ is possibly that of Friedrich Heinrich Bothe (1771-1855), German poet, translator and classical philologist. Tchemerzine, X, 32; Dufour-Plan 55-56.

First edition, inscribed by Keller to artist and illustrator W. Graham Robertson: ‘To Mr Graham Robertson I send this book, hoping that it may convince him of the reality of my cordial admiration. Helen Keller. September 24th 1938’ and loosely inserted is an envelope containing a telegram from Alexander Woollcott to Graham Robertson at Sandhills, his Surrey home saying, ‘Helen Keller and I send our love to you at Christmas’. Keller’s inscription is reproduced in Robertson’s Letters. In a letter of 29 December 1938 he recorded receiving ‘to my inordinate pride, an affectionate message from that eighth wonder of the world, Helen Keller. What have I ever done that she should think of me’. Several days later he outlined the background of their connection. ‘Helen Keller began some time ago to send me little messages through a mutual friend who had spoken to her of Time Was. I felt compelled to tell her (very gently and tactfully, I hope) that I was quite unable to believe her existence, and that she and her impossible career were quite obviously a beautiful fairy tale invented for the encouragement and comfort of the world. She then sent me one of her books, inscribed (of course she can write―that is quite a minor miracle) … And then she got Time Was in Braille and seemed to like it. And that’s how it happened that am privileged to call myself a friend of Helen Keller’s’.

First edition. Boydell’s tables allowed dealers in beer, wine and spirits to accurately assess the true contents of part-used casks through measurement of ullage (the empty portion of any barrel) — an essential calculation in tax and excise assessments. Several new editions were advertised in the nineteenth-century but all editions are rare.
The author was probably the same Boydell who described himself as ‘ships-husband’ on the title of his The Merchant Freighter’s and Captains of Ships Assistant - Being Tables Calculated with the Greatest Accuracy (‘London: printed for the author... and to be had at Lloyd's, the New York, the New England, the Jamaica, and the Pensylvania coffee-houses; and of any bookseller in Great Britain, 1764). ESTC: Leeds, NLS, Glasgow, St Andrews, U Kentucky, UVA, Saint Olaf (MN) and State Library of Tasmania.

First edition of this Covenanter propaganda pamphlet of the era of the Bishops’ Wars, purporting to offer intelligence as to the parlous and divisive state of the English nation, particularly the English forces, who the author ‘L.D.’ claims to have infiltrated. It is full of fascinating gossip and opinion, albeit mainly fictional, sometimes in verse form.

‘What will you fight for a Booke of Common Prayer?
What will you fight for a Court of High Commission?.... [English]
Wee fight to have our true Religion stand:
Wee fight to keepe our Lawes unvilified...’ [Scots].

The spy-narrator recounts various sorties into England. At Canterbury he visits Becket’s tomb and scrawls on the cathedral wall, hears a sermon at Lambeth, visits Guy Fawkes’s house and reports a dissolute Whitehall, with the King having fled. Wing L10 (another edition of 22 pages is L11); Thomason E.153[22].

A superb ‘game of goose’ on the theme of the peoples of the known world, with fine engraved corner vignettes representing Africa, America, Europe and Asia and 63 vignettes representing different peoples. They include native Americans (of California, Mexico, the Amazon, Iroquois, Brazil, Chile, Tierra del Fuego, Paraguay and Nootka Island), inhabitants of Java, Sumatra, China, Japan, Tahiti, Australia (Nouvelle Hollande) and New Zealand, as well as Africa, the Middle East and Europe. In common with other games of this type, the cultural attitudes represented by the symbolism and mode of play is worthy of decoding. With dice and counters, the players are to navigate (culturally, not geographically) from China (evidently still at the furthest reaches of the European geographical imagination) to France, via the 63 numbered squares, with their various characteristics, advantages and disadvantages. Mexico (square 6) is shown as a bridge and players landing there jump straight to square 12 (the Amazon); at 19 (Tahiti) the islanders’ hospitality detains players for two turns; at 31 (Siberia) the players waits in exile until another player reaches the same square and rescues them, at square 42, traditionally the ‘puzzle’ square (Japan) the player is refused landing and goes back to 30 (Abyssinia) and just before the end, square 58 (New Zealand) the player encounters the reputed anthrophages (man-eaters) and returns to the start. Ciompi/Seville Collection 32; Adrian Seville, ‘The geographical Jeux de l'Oie of Europe. Les Jeux de l’Oie géographiques de l’Europe’, Belgeo, 3-4, 2008, 427-444 (56).

First edition of this British political satire, co-opting Aesop’s animals of in a series of witty verses, capitalising on the popularity of the Aesop in English via the editions of Ogilby and L’Estrange. ‘In 1698 a whole series of fables began to appear anonymously which set Aesop on a journey through England and the rest of Europe. He comments through his animal characters about the Jacobite threat, William’s government of England, and Louis XIV’s ambitions on the continent. As one writer put it, “It is now the Mode, it seems, for Brutes to turn Politicians,” and Aesop was chosen as their main expositor. Aesop at Tunbridge (1698) was a structured attack on William and on Whig principles in general. In the same year Aesop at Bath criticized the Jacobites; Aesop Return d from Tunbridge committed the hapless supporter of the Jacobites to Bedlam; Old Aesop at Whitehall defended the government; and Aesop at Amsterdam objected to the very monarchical forms of government supported in one way or another by Whig, Tory, and Jacobite factions’ (Daniel, ‘Political and Philosophical Uses of Fables in eighteenth-century England’, The Eighteenth Century, 23, 2, 1982, p. 153).
Wing O196. ESTC lists US copies at Clark (UCLA), Folger, Harvard, Cincinnati and Texas.

One of Heath’s famous graphic satires on the theme of The March of Intellect, which expressed contemporary anxiety over technological 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 stuffed with milliner. A steam carriage full of redcoat soldiers is seen in background, along with passenger balloons and a flying warship (raining canon-fire at ships below) in the air beside bridge crossing the English Channel between Dover and Calais.