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First edition of this important parallel English, Latin and Greek version. It followed a poor piracy of 1882 badly translated from Liseux’s French edition of 1882. Carrington gave a wry veiled account of its publication in his 1902 catalogue, Forbidden Books: ‘Were I a bookseller, I do not think I should ever take the trouble to print such a book as I have now before me. Here is a Latin work, full of notes, and bristling with Greek quotations. A most careful and masterly translation has been placed opposite every page of the original text, and it needs no literary critic to see that no one but a real classical scholar—an old Oxford man—could ever have successfully struggled with such a task... The two stout volumes have evidently been printed on the Continent—and for very good and valid reasons, as no English printer would dare to undertake such a work,— therefore each page would have to be submitted to the translator, at least three or four times, foreign compositors working mechanically. Many months would thus pass in wearisome proof-reading, and when at last the hundred copies are struck off, and each man receives his due, what margin of profit awaits the silly bookseller-publisher? He is insulted in every way and laughed at if he dares to wonder that the British Customs seize any copies...’

Carrington published some 300 titles (some using his own name and others using false imprints, as here) mainly in Paris where he lived from about 1894 until 1907, selling books from a shop in the Faubourg Montmartre. He notably printed a number of works by Oscar Wilde when few other publishers would risk implication in Wilde’s downfall and, besides outright pornography, he printed a number of editions of classical and oriental authors and important works on the psychology of sex. In 1907 he was deported from France for consistently publishing and selling literature “of a very obscene and vulgar character”. He continued his publishing business in Brussels before returning to Paris in 1912. By 1920 Carrington was blind from the effects of advanced syphilis, being admitted to the mental hospital at Ivry, south of Paris, where he died in 1921.

First edition of this codification of the laws governing the Cornish tin industry. The Convocation of Tinners exercised ancient rights of jurisdiction over much of Cornwall; customary rights exercised long before the codification of English law and which had been confirmed by royal charters since the time of Edward I. Stannary law was sanctioned by the crown in recognition of the special responsibilities of the Cornish tinners in providing a valuable raw material. It has been claimed that the right to hold Convocations has never been formally repealed by the English crown, a legal anomaly exploited by the Cornish nationalist movement. A previous codification had been printed in 1725. Goldsmiths’ 8776; Higgs 433; Kress 5279.

First edition, rare, of this collection of children’s songs. Ludovica Brentano, later baroness Desbordes (1787-1854), affectionately known as Lulu, was grand daughter of Sophie von La Roche (the first widely known German female novelist) and she became patron of the Grimm brothers; contributing two tales to their Kinder- und Hausmärchen. Worldcat: NYPL and Harvard in US, BL in UK.

First edition of the official report of Curzon’s administration of Indian home affairs during his period as Viceroy. Curzon’s office was contentious and was concluded following a bitter feud with Kitchener. His belief in traditional sovereignty was frequently at odds with emergent Indian nationalism but many of his achievements have been long lasting, especially in the field of law, education and cultural heritage. Nearly 100 pages of the Home Department report are devoted to his judicial reforms with a further hundred concern policing and penal policies. His work reforming the University system is recounted in detail and there are interesting accounts of the merger between the Calcutta City Library and the Imperial Library to form what became the Indian National Library. Medical, sanitary and plague issues also occupy a full part.

This is one of several official reports on aspects of Curzon’s administration, subtitled: Public Works; Department of Commerce and Industry; Department of Revenue and Agriculture and Railway Board. All are very scarce. COPAC and OCLC between them list copies of the Home Department report at Bodley and Syracuse only.

First edition of this extraordinary treatise on the status of eunuchs in society, according to civil and canon law. Largely based on classical sources, history and (most interestingly) anecdotal evidence from the Orient, Ancillon considers the reasons for the phenomenon (including slavery, household, employment or punishment for sexual misdemeanour). The major contention is that while civil law permits a eunuch to marry, canon law should forbid it (as it did) on the grounds that a marriage could not be consummated. Along the way Ancillon recounts numerous anecdotes of famous eunuchs, notably Abelard, castrated at the instigation of Heloise’s family.

The book was later translated into English by Robert Samber as part of Edmund Curll’s Eunuchism display’d (1718).

This copy of Traité des Eunuques is one of at least two issues of the same year with slightly different paginations and title ornaments. The ‘Epitre dedicatoire’ is signed: ‘C. d’Ollincan’ an anagram of the author’s real name. Gay III, 1239.

First edition, the final page with 18 additional lines which ‘were added in the Recitation at the Theatre’, with references to Addison and Johnson. ‘A very high-coloured and just picture of the present sanguinary anarchy of France, which Richards well describes as tainting the air of Europe’ (British Critic). Jackson, p. 184.

First edition. A humorous skit on English lawyers. ‘“The Pleader’s Guide” is the production of Mr. Anstey, a son of the celebrated author of the Bath Guide. From the merit of this volume, we might almost be tempted to believe that wit his hereditary. The same wit, the same humour, the same playful satire, that adorn the Bath Guide are to be found here. To render the jargon of the law at all bearable in verse, seems at first impossible, but Mr. Anstey has proved the fallacy of such an opinion. The man who can read the Pleader’s Guide without laughing, must be in possession of the most inflexible muscles, or a more than common share of stupidity’ (Poetical Register). Jackson, p. 211.

First edition, rare. A satirical attack on the effeminate ‘coxcomical fops’ then to be seen depicted in the windows of all the print shops. In the words of the OED a Macaroni was ‘one of a class of 18th-c exquisites, consisting of young men who had travelled and affected continental tastes and fashions.’ ‘But now, alas! what pigmy monsters team? / What crowds of beaus effeminate are seen?’ Jackson, p. 21. ESTC: BL, Harvard, Huntington, Illinois, Yale (3 copies: Walpole, Beinecke and Sterling).

First edition of this collection of Whig satires on the inactivity of the Tory ministry. At least Jekyll and perhaps the whole work is by Richardson. The ‘Extracts’ purportedly come from an album from Mr. Steele’s house at Streatham, a noted Tory haunt where ‘each sabbath was spent in debate;... dispatches were dispatched without number, and without end, until Ministers had accomplished their own wise purposes... and, to use an appropriate line of the late Dr Johnson; “Had killed the yet unanimated young”’.

There were three further editions and a Dublin reprint in 1788-9, but the first edition is uncommon. Jackson, p. 139.

A satire on the town council of Edinburgh. This second edition, followed swiftly by a third appeared in the same year as the first. The anonymous engraved plate bearing the motto Risum teneatis amici (can you help but laugh, friends?) is a riot of drinking, brawling and vomiting around the civic punch-bowl. Not in Jackson. All issues are very scarce, ESTC lists copies of this edition at BL, Cambridge and NLS only.

A reissue of the rare Logic, Ontology, and the Art of Poetry (London, Carnan & Newbery, 1776; Roscoe J67), with a cancel title-page and conjugate plate. With a 7-page Newbery catalogue at the end. ‘The imprint is false; probably printed at York for Wilson, Spence and Mawman’ (ESTC).

An intriguing reissue of the sheets of a collective volume of John Newbery’s Circle of the Sciences (for which he wrote the poetry analysis), first published more than twenty years earlier, in 1776. The works themselves originally appeared separately, in 1748 and 1746 respectively, and in the 1776 collected volume are described as ‘considerably enlarged, and greatly improved’. How the sheets then got from Newbery to ‘A. Millar’ (i.e. Wilson?) et al. is a mystery.

This issue is very rare. ESTC records only the British Library and Yale copies; WorldCat adds two more, at Wagner College and Wyoming. Alston VII, 274; not in Roscoe.

Sole edition. In the Monthly Review’s opinion: ‘A fruitless attempt to catch the Eel of Wit by the tail.’ With allusions to Wilkes, Garrick, and Catherine the Great, among others. Jackson, p. 56.

‘A satirical poem on the amours of various members of the nobility’ (ESTC) or, as the Monthly Review succinctly put it: ‘Poetical smut. Rochester revived.’ A number of imitations and replies were elicited. It is an early work by Perry (formerly ‘Pirie’, 1756–1821), a Scottish journalist recently arrived in London ‘to try to break into the literary world’ (Oxford DNB). By the end of his career he had become ‘one of the most notable journalists of the age when the newspaper press was becoming established as a force in the country’ (ibid.)

Studies of Gymnotus electricus by members of the Royal Society and their correspondents had captured the imagination of the British public in unexpected ways. While the investigations of Walsh and Hunter made genuine discoveries into the nature of electricity (which culminated in the invention of Volta’s battery), contemporary wits and pamphleteers took advantage of the phallic connotations of the eel and its electrical properties to deride the sexual peregrinations of London society.

ESTC lists 4 editions of 1777. This ‘new edition’ is enlarged form the first, but probably preceded the stated ‘third’ edition, with a much enlarged pagination. Jackson, p. 52 (first edition, with a different pagination).

First edition, an anonymous satire on contemporary political figures, notably William Pitt. ‘This satire, wrote in the manner of Swift, is not destitute of merit. The versification is loose, and many of the lines hobble; but some thoughts are manly, just, and sarcastic’ (Critical Review). A second edition followed in the same year.

First edition of this extensive global dictionary of conflict, covering both ancient and modern history. Though the longest entries tend to be for battles involving France, there are good entries for many other conflicts. Notable are: Agincourt, Bannockburn, Barnet, Belle-Isle, Bosworth, Siege of Calais, Calcutta, Crécy, Culloden, Dunes, Dunkirk, Edinburgh, Gènes, Gibraltar, Harlem, Hastings, Inverness, Jerusalem (many), Lerida, Londonderry, Madras, Marlborough, Martinique, Messina (numerous), Minden, Naseby, Orleans, Paris, Poitiers, Pondicherry and Rome (many). The American continent is represented by entries for: Cartagena de Indias (1741), Choueugen [Oswego], (1756), Havana (1762), Louisbourg (1745 and 1758), Quebec (1759), Rio (1711), Tumbes (and the conquest of Peru). The first volume concludes with an alphabetical index of military leaders.

First edition of the first book of poetry by the great Oriental scholar. ‘The success in 1772 of Poems, Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Languages owed much to the fashionable craze for things oriental; according to Elizabeth Montagu, “The descriptions are so fine, & all the objects so brilliant, that the sense aches at them!” As a poet Jones blended philosophical allegory and dramatic narrative into the genre of the oriental verse tale, but as a scholar he created, through his concern for accuracy of translation and comparative linguistic method, a demand for genuine Eastern products while significantly adjusting racial and political stereotypes... Two essays which Jones included in this volume are highly significant in terms of the history of criticism, as they install the lyric at the centre of poetry. “On the poetry of the Eastern nations” establishes Jones as a major precursor of the Romantics’ (Oxford DNB). Also included is ‘Caissa, or, the Game of Chess, a Poem. Written in the Year 1763.’ The poem, in heroic couplets, tells the story of Caïssa, who initially repels the advances of the god of war, Mars. Spurned, Mars seeks the aid of the god Euphron (Jones’s invention), brother of Venus, who creates the game of chess as a gift for Mars to win Caïssa’s favour. Jackson, p, 15.

First edition. Edward Jerningham’s anonymously published imitation of Gray's Elegy, Il Latte takes a positive view of breastfeeding among mothers and censures the fashion among the better-off for putting children out to nurse. ‘The purport of this poem with this affected title, is to exhort mothers to nurse their children at their own breasts; and nothing certainly can be more proper or more natural. If strains like these, ye matrons, can have any influence upon you; let it not be in vain that the poet says, Unsway’d by fashion’s dull, unseemly jest, / Still to your bosom that your infant cling, / There banquet off an ever-welcome guest, / Unblamed inebriate at that healthful spring’ (Monthly Review).

‘That sacred shrine! where female virtue glows,
Where ev’n the Graces all their treasures bring,
And where the lily, temper'd with the rose,
Harmonious contrast! breathes an Eden spring:

That shrine! where Nature with presaging aim,
What time her friendly aid Lucina brings,
The snowy nectar pours, delightful stream!
Where flutt’ring Cupids dip their purple wings’.

With Cobbett’s autograph dedication addressed to Pope Pius VIII: ‘To His Holiness Pope Pius the Eighth. The present head of that holy church under the influence of which England enjoyed so many ages of plenty freedom happiness and renown this new edition of the history of the Protestant Reformation is dedicated by and in the handwriting of His Holinesses Most Humble Servant William Cobbett. Kensington [1?]0 May 182.’

A History of the Protestant Reformation describes at great length the means employed by the state to dispossess the English poor, beginning with the crown’s appropriation of church lands during the Reformation. It first appeared in two parts (1824–7) was a bestseller and was several times reprinted, including in this second edition (preceded by at least one stereotyped reprint). Cobbett had enthusiastically espoused the cause of Catholic emancipation; his autograph dedication to the Pope apparently appears in more than one copy.

First edition in French of Tales of the Colonies, presentation copy, inscribed by the translator. In this, the first of his two novels, Rowcroft drew on his own experience as an Australian settler. The work is in part a guide for prospective settlers and part a sensational tale of the hazards of pioneer-era Van Dieman’s Land: sheep-stealers, bushrangers, Aboriginal attackers, floods, snakes, eagles and wild cattle. Very scarce. OCLC lists 7 copies: Bibliothèque Nationale, University of Basle, National Library of Australia, State Library of New South Wales, State Library of Victoria, University of Melborne and National Library of New Zealand.

Contemporary caricature portraits of the great American millionaires Carnegie, Pierpont-Morgan, Gordon-Bennett, Harjes, Frick and Depew. The drawing was probably intended for reduction and publication in an (unidentified) journal. Rouveyre (1879-1962) was immensely prolific as a caricaturist and maintained friendships and correspondence with important figures such as Apollinaire and Matisse (having met the latter as joint students of the symbolist painter Gustave Moreau).