The first edition (a later issue) of the memoirs of the renowned French courtesan Cora Pearl (1835-1886), published the year of her death. Before the publication, she is said to have contacted her former lovers, offering to anonymize their names in her autobiography if they paid her. Greatly successful, the..... More

Dedication copy of a rare suite of large fantastic utopian architectural designs of surprising modernity for the time by the Swiss symbolist artist, architect and poet Albert Trachsel (1863-1929), considered by Vivien Greene, in her catalog for the 2017 Guggenheim exhibition in New York City, the “Edgar Allan Poe of..... More

Extraordinary, very rare portfolio of 58 fine, original photographs of dredges taken by the noted Dutch photographer Johannes Henk Tollens (1864-1936) during the first years of the 20th century. Apparently produced to commemorate the merger which formed the A. Bos & J. P. Heijblom dredging company of Dordrecht, Holland, the..... More

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Scarce first edition of these two essays on dramatic poetry and the practical aspects of set design and theater production, of interest among 16th century Italian treatises for their monographic focus and particularly their direct link not only to a particular Italian court (Ferrara) but even to a specific production..... More

Rare 18th-century engraving – relating to the Spanish Flota de Indias and to the important naval port of Cadiz – printed by the renowned Remondini firm of printmakers, a company noted for aggressively expanding its print selling business far from its home base in the Veneto. The hand-colored print depicts..... More

Only edition of the first map of China engraved and printed in England. With its illustrations of a Chinese man and a Chinese woman dressed in their traditional Chinese garb, it must have been a remarkable sight for an English audience highly unlikely to have set eyes on an in-the-flesh..... More

Very attractive early 18th-century French illustrated manuscript of practical geometry in seven books, including individual sections on longimetry, planimetry, and stereometry—the fundamentals of precision surveying and draftsmanship.  The manuscript closely follows but is not identical to Jacques Ozanam’s Géométrie Pratique du sr Boulenger (Paris 1684), which itself was a revision..... More

The first edition of this plague treatise by Paracelsus (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, 1493-1541), the “Luther of Medicine” and one of the key figures in the history of medicine. Written originally in Nördlingen in 1529-1530, it remained unpublished during Paracelsus’ lifetime and subsequently taken up and edited for publication by..... More

Two satirical auca broadsides, each with 24 images of dwarfs, illustrating Catalan trades and archetypes, from the Valencia-based printing shop of Ildefonso Mompié (ca. 1785-1855). Both prints feature characters that would have been instantaneously recognizable to their audiences. The first print, depicting female archetypes and professions, includes illustrations of a...... More

This fascinating print depicts a demonstration of static electricity to the Society Felix Meritis (Amsterdam) on a twin-plate machine, built especially for the Society by the renowned instrument maker John Cuthbertson. The double plate was Cuthbertson’s modification of an earlier design with a globe and cylinder generators. The machines built..... More

Scarce first edition of the first Italian-language Sacrobosco, composed by the Servite monk Mauro and containing an unusually rich program of illustrations. The work is further augmented by Mauro’s ‘additioni’ to the basic text of Sacrobosco and several appendices for the benefit of his vernacular reader, including the ‘secrets of..... More

Only edition. Rare in its completeness, as offered here with its three parts. An understudied botanical work on exotic plants at the Orto Vaticano Indico in Rome, imported from different parts of the world for cultivation and acclimatization. The book was written by Filippo Luigi Gigli (or Gilii) (1756-1821), an..... More