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’).

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).

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.

Issued in a small number of typescripts for private circulation. An extraordinary short history and summary of several interesting cases that occurred in the New York Branch of the Office of Naval Intelligence, compiled by Hollis H. Hunnewell, Voluntary Aide with other staff members for Lieutenant-Commander Spencer Eddy, Officer-in-Charge. It covers an important era of development, when the ONI (the oldest member of the US intelligence network) was tasked with espionage in monitoring foreign threats, both in naval affairs and domestically, detecting hostile acts among non-American communities, and acting as censor for cable communications. Though the author states in the inserted letter ‘I must lay stress on the fact that these pages are strictly confidential in nature, and for your own personal use’, the books seems, in retrospect, to be a rather reckless exposition of the Office’s actvities.
It is both serious and comical, with the the first half of its text setting out the history and aims of the ONS, its personnel and departmental structure, and the second half presenting a series of humorous anecdotes. The Office’s departments comprised: the executive and the espionage departments together with departments for: cables, plant protection, commercial, banking, Latin-American, I.W.W (for surveillance of the unions or ‘Industrial Workers of the World’), Russian and Czecho-Slovak, legal and file. A paragraph each describes their remit and a photographic copy of a flow-chart diagram explains the procedure of communication between agents and officers. A list of officers (including Eddy and Hunnewell) is provided, comprising voluntary aides, agents, enlisted men, enlisted men detailed to the Postal Censorship Office, enlisted women, civilians, telephone officers. The text then becomes an account of humorous mistakes and misunderstandings, presumably for the amusement of former members of the office. These are accompanied by well-known illustrator Maginel Wright Enright’s lighthearted vignettes (presumably commissioned for this account) which would be charming except for one obviously racist caricature accompanying an equally racist anecdote. There are two stories of botched espionage attempts using dictographs: one in which the apparatus was hidden in what was thought to be a disused fireplace in the home of a suspect (with predictable consequences) and another in which agents pick up only sounds of an amorous encounter between and agent and a suspect.
Worldcat locates two copies one at Georgetown University, the other in the US Naval War College Library. The latter is digitised, and contains one additional photograph (a group photo of officers) not present in our copy (probably never bound in). Though the texts are essentially identical, minor typographic variances confirm that copies were individually typed rather than duplicated. Our copy (unlike the NWCL copy) is specially bound in the style of Cobden Sanderson at the Rose Bindery, Boston (which was owned by the author, Hunnewell).

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’.

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).

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.

Dean’s Rag Book, number 291. A superbly preserved rag book from Dean and Co, who pioneered the rag book for the youngest children in 1903, producing boldly coloured printed calico books designed to be washable and indestructible. The Dean logo show two dogs pulling at a rag book. The pinked edges were designed to minimise fraying, and in this case the copy is unused.

Lots of Things, in addition to its various vocabulary images, includes the memorable verse:

‘A leaf of lettuce, or a bunch
Of carrots is, to rabbits
Far nicer than a costly lunch:
They have such frugal habits.

Pigs on the other hand are crude
And greedy, while their feeding
Is mannerless and even rude;
It shews their lack of breeding’. WorldCat: Auckland (NZ) and Cotsen (Princeton).

A file copy of Dean’s Rag Book no. 324, full of patriotic imagery - a union jack flying on a sandcastle, a shamrock, rose and thistle, a crown and sceptre, a medal, flags, a drum, a toy aeroplane and a soldier. A superbly preserved rag book from Dean and Co, who pioneered the rag book for the youngest children in 1903, producing boldly coloured printed calico books designed to be washable and indestructible. The Dean logo show two dogs pulling at a rag book. The inserted slip lists further numbered titles in 4 series of different sizes, as well as Dean’s rag dolls. The pinked edges were designed to minimise fraying, and in this case the copy is unused. JISC LibraryHub lists a copy at NLS. The Cotsen copy listed by WorldCat at Princeton has the same title but a different series number (228).

First edition of this very rare collection devoted to the street life of Paris, as observed by an imagined flâneur, some thirty years before Baudelaire defined the characteristics of the archetypal literary and aesthetic wanderer. The plates depict various familiar and unfamiliar aspects of Paris life — the title plate depicts the widow Lagarde, a dog and cat groomer, while other plates show browsers at a book stall in the Rue de Grès, walkers in the Luxembourg gardens, female basket carriers at la Halle, various vendors and hawker and fashionable women in the Boulevard de l’Opera. Complete sets are exceptionally rare (the British Museum catalogue lists only four of the series, for example).
Forest was a prolific caricaturist, working alongside both Grandville and Daumier for satirical journals such as La Silhouette and La Caricature. WorldCat lists only the Morgan copy (Michael Sadleir; from the library of Gordon N. Ray). Inventaire du fonds français après 1800, v. VIII, p. 101

An attractive pocket edition of Ségur’s study of the historical condition of women in ancient and modern society (first published in 1802) with a fourth volume containing Ida Saint-Elme’s continuation (first added to Les Femmes in the edition of 1822 with the title De la Condition des femmes sous l’Empire et sous la Restauration). It contains chapters on the Empress Josephine, Princess Charlotte of Wales, Mesdames de la Lafayette, de Sévigné, du Chatelet, de Graffigny, Riccoboni, de Genlis, and de Duras. This complete edition of 1828 is rare.

First edition, rare, of these collected sermons by a French Huguenot emigré pastor in Dublin. Two significant sermons are on the subject of religious toleration, and the moral philosopher Francis Hutcheson is named among the subscribers.
The first to sermons are entitled ‘Contre l’Intolerance’ and ‘Les justes bornes de la Tolerance’. The Toleration Act had been enacted in Ireland in 1719, granting Dissenters (but not Catholics) freedom of worship and the subject of religious toleration was widely debated. Caillard argues that not only was intolerance immoral, but also irrational and imprudent. ‘It is imprudent since enforcing a set of beliefs undermines society: it leads groups to take a defensive stance against other groups, destroying public order. It is irrational since, while coercion can lead people to accept a belief outwardly, it cannot alter their inner convictions. It is immoral because coercion’s inability to change inner beliefs means it can only breed lies and hypocrisy, and because individuals have the right to self-determination. However this toleration was not to be extended to Catholics. This sermon was preached on 5th November, commemorating the failure of the Gunpowder Plot. In a later sermon, Caillard established the limits of toleration. While still endorsing the individual right to self-determination, Caillard argues there is a limitation on religious freedom: that such freedom not be harmful to religion in general or society as a whole.’ (see Toleration in 18th century Ireland, Irish Philosophy.com)
The book includes a subscriber’s list of men and women, of both Irish, French and other extraction, including Francis Hutcheson, then resident in Dublin. It is not difficult to trace a connection between Caillard’s arguments for tolerance based on circumstances and Hutcheson’s later theories of moral rights, including the right to free conscience — which were later to have a profound influence on both the French and American constitutions. Outside Europe we find copies at Illinois, Charleston and Penn only.