Rare first edition of this important and graphically striking work on sixteenth-century fortification by Girolamo Portigiani (c. 1540-91). Consisting entirely of finely engraved images of star forts and details of their defensive systems, the volume is in fact as much a book about virtuoso perspective as it is an exploration..... More
Rare first edition of this Mannerist suite of designs for triumphal arches and entrances, by a Florentine who had been invited to the French court by Marie de Medici, became royal engineer to Louis XIII, and built grottos and fountains on the grounds of St. Germain-en-Laye and Fontainebleau. He was..... More
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
![Directorium generale uranometricum in quo trigonometriae logarithmicae fundamenta... [Including:]...](/pictures/thumb/3715.jpg?v=1508791110)
Very attractive copy of the rare first edition of the first work on logarithms printed in Italy, the first published work of a great mathematician of whom Galileo wrote, “few, if any, since Archimedes, have delved as far and as deep into the science of geometry.” Cavalieri introduced and popularized..... More
First collected edition of this landmark of discovery Americana, augmented with new material and, above all, the first appearance of Champlain’s seminal two-sheet map of the Great Lakes. This copy comes in the rare first issue of both text and map, in a splendid contemporary red morocco binding with the..... More
Rare first edition of the first book on Vietnam in English, an eyewitness account of the commerce, government and cultural life of Cochin-China (central Vietnam) written by the Jesuit missionary Cristoforo Borri and first published in Italian in 1631. Borri begins by marking the kingdom’s boundaries, identifying it as a...... More
Rare first French edition (original Spanish 1585) of Diego de Torres's history of north Africa, a detailed account of the on-going conflict between the Xarifes (the Saadian dynasty), the king of Fez, and the Turks, augmented with his own first-hand observations. Following the expulsion of the Moors from Europe..... More
Rare first and only edition of a treatise on trigonometry – illustrated with numerous woodcut diagrams – by James Hume of Godscroft, a Scottish mathematician living in Paris. The work includes information on logarithms as recently discovered by John Napier in 1614 (including a folding table of logarithms based on..... More
The preferred large format French language 3rd edition. This is a large and absolutely genuine example of this classic illustrated travelogue to the East and West Indies, termed by Lach “the most important of the firsthand accounts published independently of the great travel collections” (I.198). No other book contained so..... More
First atlas issue, in warm contemporary color of this classic Dutch map of Bermuda. As were most 17th century maps of Bermuda, Hondius’ was based on Richard Norwood’s 1618 chart, executed on behalf of the Bermuda Company. The map thus includes the parishes and tribes allotted to the company’s principal..... More
First edition of Galileo’s most important work, the foundation of modern physics. This work was Galileo’s ‘greatest scientific achievement … Mathematicians and physicists of the later seventeenth century, Isaac Newton among them, rightly supposed that Galileo had begun a new era in the science of mechanics. It was upon his..... More
Rare 17th-century separately issued engraving depicting the newly excavated and constructed Vatican grottoes beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, a print produced by Pietro Paolo Drei after designs by his father, Benedetto Drei. Both father and son served as ‘factors’ for the Reverenda Fabbrica of St. Peter’s and thus played pivotal..... More
Rare first edition Olivier de Vrée’s (1596-1652) compendium of seals of the Counts of Flanders, a volume notable both for its antiquarian rigor – the work remains a standard reference on the subject – and for its some 300 copperplate engravings meticulously cataloguing the development of seals from the establishment..... More
First edition, and evidently the most complete copy extant, of this calligraphy manuel by a Genoese writing master. Notwithstanding its rich mercantile culture and the educational infrastructure that supported it, few such manuals were published in Genoa. Of five other copies listed by Becker, that described in Marzoli is the..... More
Extremely rare first edition of a Baroque Italian calligraphy manual for students. The present copy contains 19 handwriting and calligraphic samples, almost all ornately embellished with figures of men, women, cherubs, birds, insects, or domestic animals, in addition to a portrait of Tensini after the title-page. Tensini’s samples, mostly passages..... More
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 recently..... More
One of the most richly decorative, early maps of Italy in vibrant color of the period. The map’s title, in Italian, is flanked by two caryatid-like women. Below the cartouche, the legendary founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, are nursed by their adoptive wolf mother. The sea is embellished with..... More
Elaborate manuscript notebook by a mid-seventeenth-century priest from Milan containing his own aphorisms, observations and quotations modeled after contemporary calligraphy manuals with unusually elaborate and well-executed figurative borders drawn in his hand, and interspersed with anguished outbursts on love’s torment in a later hand. Chiassi’s drawings, modelled from Antonio Tempesta’s..... 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
Rare first edition of the collected mathematical writings of the François Viète (1540-1603), who was “the first extensively to use letters of the alphabet to present numerical quantities and the foremost algebraist of the sixteenth century” (Hutchinson’s Dictionary of Scientific Bibliography, p. 690). Viète used letters “both for known …..... More
Very rare first and only edition of a practical handbook of business mathematics by Giovanni Battista Pisani (born circa 1606), who promises on the work’s title page to help readers “solve the intricate Labyrinth of mercantile accounting.” Pisani - who has an unusual literary touch - dedicates his Giardino aritmetico..... More
A beautiful example of this landmark in the mapping of South Africa. It appeared in Dudley’s Arcano de Mare, “the first sea atlas in which every chart was based on Mercator’s projection, the first to show prevailing winds and currents in the main harbours and anchorages, the first to give..... More
First state of Robert Dudley’s rare, beautiful chart of the eastern coast of Greenland. It was published in Dudley’s Arcano de Mare, one of the most strikingly beautiful works of maritime cartography ever produced and the first sea atlas by an Englishman. “It was the first sea atlas in which..... More
Second edition of Aleotti's Italian translation of Hero's Pneumatics, and like the author's related title on automata, of interest for 17th-century theatrical machinery and festival productions. The mechanical wonders of the school of Alexandria gave the Renaissance Vitruvian architect engineer the sources he needed, for example, for garden automata; for..... More
Rare first edition of this portrait book of members of the Venetian Accademia degli Incogniti, representing a Who’s Who of the more libertine and belligerent literati of early 17th-century northern Italy: of particular interest to women’s studies and the history of music. In total 106 members are listed each with..... More