Extremely rare first edition of this ephemeral pamphlet documenting the royal audience of the Siamese embassy to France in 1686/7. The arrival of three Siamese ambassadors in northern France in the summer of 1686 caused a great deal of consternation in the popular sphere: illustrations of the embassy were frequently..... More

Rare first and sole edition of this description of a sundial of the author's invention, which functioned as an astronomical perpetual calendar: determining for any day of the year the sun's rising, noon, setting, and mid-night, place of the sun in the Zodiac, etc. The work explains how to take..... More

Extremely rare first edition of this account of Athens by the Italian adventurer Cornelio Magni, one of very few accounts of that city to appear in the early modern era and one of even fewer to give accurate, up to date eyewitness illustrations of its monuments. “After the fall of..... More

Two rare suites of engravings depicting Pietro da Cortona’s celebrated frescoes in the salone of Palazzo Barberini and the Pitti Palace, then the residence of the Duke of Etro. Cortona was commissioned by Cardinal Francesco to create the artistic centerpiece of the Barberini palace, a fresco which is now recognized..... More

Rare first German-language edition of the Jesuit Christoph Fischer’s (1611-80) comprehensive two-part guide to the management of rural agricultural estates, illustrated with 2 engraved allegorical frontispieces (the meaning of which Fischer discusses in his introduction) and 12 engravings of personifications of the months and here preserved in its fine contemporary..... More

First Gronovius edition, with extensive commentary and extensive illustrations; it remained the definitive edition for well over a century. This classic military history is the work of Ammianus Marcellinus (ca. 325–after 391) a retired soldier. In the surviving section of Rerum gestarum, which covers the years 353 to 378, he..... More

The second posthumous edition of Tullia d’Aragona’s collection of poetry, published by Antoine Bulifon, who was “fundamentally important for the diffusion of women’s poetry” (Rabitti, p. 50). One of the most famous Italian sixteenth-century female poet-courtesans, Tullia d’Aragona (1501/1505-1556) has received considerable scholarly attention in the last decades, resulting in..... More

The second edition of a very rare work on military architecture by Giusto Emilio Alberghetti (1666-1755), a member of the famous Alberghetti family, the chief suppliers of guns and cannons to the Venetian Arsenal from 1487 to 1793. The work provides a copiously illustrated survey of defensive and offensive architecture..... More

An important map in a striking example that provides one of the finest specimens of Coronelli’s robust engraving style. In addition to being a state-of-the-art depiction of China, it also serves a visual compendium of the tools of a seventeenth-century surveyor and cartographer. The precisely engraved instruments decorating the map..... 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