Very rare first and only edition of the mathematician Pierre Vernier’s (1580-1637) landmark work introducing his invention of an ingenious new scale – here illustrated with a fold-out engraving – designed to greatly increase the accuracy of mensuration instruments. The scarcity of this treatise belies its broad impact on many..... More
Extremely rare first edition of Pierre Gassendi’s (1592-1655) important illustrated treatise on inertial mechanics. Written in the form of two letters addressed to the scholar and keeper of the king’s library Pierre Depuy (1582-1651), the De motu impresso “contains the first precise published formulation of the principle of inertia” as..... More
First edition, very rare in commerce, of the first appearance of any of Palladio’s work published in France and the first translation into the French language of any of his work. Traicté des cinq ordres d’Architecture is the result of the “collaboration” of three leading architects: Palladio, the translator/editor Pierre..... More
First edition, first issue and a magnificent copy of this sumptuously illustrated print Bible, commonly known as Mortier's Large Bible, in which the obsessive tendency of Golden Age Dutch culture to illustrate overwhelms any Calvinist scruple over the sinfulness or inadequacy of pictures in relation to Holy Writ, and in..... More
Extremely rare first and only edition of the mannerist printmaker Pierre Vallet’s (c. 1575-1657) celebrated illustrated adaptation of Heliodorus of Emesa’s Greek novel Aethiopica (or Theagenes and Chariclea) (c. 250 A.D.?). The volume contains, in addition to its engraved title page, 120 exquisite narrative etchings/engravings, one for each page of..... More
First edition of a rare and fundamental handbook for seventeenth-century missionaries to Indochina. The volume is a formative document by François Pallu (d. 1684) and Pierre Lambert de la Motte (d. 1679), founding members of the Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris and driving forces behind the establishment in 1665..... More
First edition of this important work on the measurement on light by “the father of photometry” (DSB) and the author’s first work on the subject. “Bouguer’s achievement was to see that the eye could be used, not as a meter but as a null indicator, i.e., to establish the equality..... More
Sammelband of 12 separately published fascicles of six engravings each, altogether 72 engraved plates. They were created after drawings by Pierre Thomas Le Clerc (c1740-c1799); seven of the cahiers were engraved by Janinet and printed by Le Père et Avaulez (nos. 1-3, 6, and 8-10), and five were engraved and..... More