Very rare separately issued view of Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome, etched by Giovanni Maggi (1566-1618) and printed in 1600 by Andrea Vaccari (d. 1627) in honor of a certain Manilio Orlandi (fl. c. 1550s-c. 1602), captain of munitions (capitano di bombardieri) at Castel Sant’Angelo. The etching is unusual among printed..... More

Rare first Spanish edition of Book IX of Pliny’s Natural History devoted to fish, bound with the second edition (first 1599) of Books VII and VIII. All books are dedicated to King Philip III, with his armorial device on each titlepage. Their editor and translator, Jerónimo Gómez de Huerta (1573-1643)..... More

A very attractive example in nice original condition of the very rare 1603 reissue (new title page only) of the first Spanish edition (1599/1600) of Giovanni Botero’s (1544-1617) influential history of the world. Our copy is remarkably complete with all 5 folio-size maps of the world and continents based Ortelius..... More

First English edition of this eyewitness anthropological account of the Americas, chiefly Inca Peru and Aztec Mesoamerica, by the Jeusit father José de Acosta, “a more thoughtful and a more thorough account of the Indian world than anything then available” (Pagden). Acosta’s crowning achievement in the present volume is his..... More

Scarce first Latin edition (following the original German by a year) of one of the most widely diffused Northern European surveying and drafting books, of great interest for the history of scale drawing, architectural drafting, and precision instrumentation, by the Flemish-born polymath and instrument maker Levinus Hulsius (1546-1606). The third..... More

Very rare first and only edition of an early important collection of 201 medical case-studies, or observationes, by the physician and botanist Paul de Reneaulme (1560-1624), a native of Blois, who is best remembered for his finely illustrated work on plants, the Specimen historiae plantarum (1611). The present work, notable..... More

Rare first German edition of this influential Jesuit letterbook from China describing Matteo Ricci’s acceptance at the court of Peking and marking a shift in European perceptions of China from “a view of China as seen from Macao to a view of China from within.” (de Paula Nogueira, p. 426)..... More

Rare second edition of “decidedly the best of the Renaissance books on ophthalmology” (Garrison). “Guillemeau was a pupil of Ambroise Paré; his book was an epitome of the existing knowledge on the subject, chiefly from Greek and Arabian sources” (Garrison & Morton). Guillemeau was a leading authority on ophthalmology, obstetrics..... More

Extremely rare first and sole edition of this work of polemical antiquarianism, seeking to prove that the remains of St. James the Apostle were not buried at Santiago de Compostella, as Europe’s most pious pilgrims had believed since the 9th century, but in the vaults of the chapel of St..... More

Scarce, French-language edition of Du Laurens'works, with a set of 26 anatomical engravings derived from Vesalius and others. "This is the second edition of the French translation of Du Laurens' collected works... which preceeded the publication of the Latin text. In addition to the author's textbook of anatomy and his..... More

Rare first edition of the fourteenth part of Hulsius's voyage anthology, a translation into German of Captain John Smith's Description of New England (London, 1616; Church 369), which includes an early copy of Smith's map of New England. Goodspeed (1927) claims that this part of Hulsius's Sammlung von Sechs und..... More

Rare first edition, first issue, of the defense of James I’s execution of Sir Walter Raleigh, written by Francis Bacon and with (according to Bacon) “very material” additions by the king himself. The work describes the circumstances surrounding Raleigh’s final voyage to America in 1618 with the purpose of locating..... More