This grand engraving in 2 folio sheets joined, reproducing Bernini’s design for the Vatican colonnade is its first official representation in print.  Though the colonnade’s construction was in its very early stages when it was printed in 1659, the present publication was Pope Alexander VII’s formal announcement to the international..... More

Rare first edition with text of this remarkably illustrated star atlas, the first to employ the woodcut to spectacular effect by showing white stars against a black background in representing the constellations. Most star atlases appearing before Semler’s work were by contrast engraved on copper, a medium not typically used..... 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

Rare early 19th-century French popular broadside, here in fine contemporary hand-color, depicting the legendary Juif-Errant, or ‘Wandering Jew,’ the mythical immortal man said to have been present at the Crucifixion who was cursed thereafter to walk the earth ceaselessly until the Second Coming. The broadside has at its center a...... 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

One of the masterworks of early modern map engraving and among the earliest focused depictions of the West Indies within the context of the Gulf of Mexico, Florida, the Yucatan, Panama, and the northern coast of South America.  A principal aim of the map is to show the discoveries of..... More

A fine example of one of the first regional maps of a part of what is now the United States in the second state (Burden 76, state 2).   Not only was this the first map to emerge directly from England’s first attempt to colonize North America—the failed Roanoke settlement—but it was also..... More

A brilliant example in rich original hand color of the rare (and only) English language edition of the earliest printed, folio-size western map specifically of China by Ortelius and “the first to show the Great Wall” (Nebenzahl). “This map remained the standard type for the interior of China for over..... More

First German language edition (also the first to be translated from the original Italian of 1611) of one of the earliest printed western works solely devoted to the Philippines by the Jesuit Gregorio Lopez, active in the Philippines from his arrival in May of 1601 until his death (in Manila)..... More

First edition of one of the great intellectual debates of the 16th century, the Elder Scaliger’s wide-ranging critique of Cardano’s de Subtilitate. The work provides a capital example of the amorphous and disputatious nature of Renaissance intellectual life just before the scientific revolution would constrict knowledge to the preserve of..... More

 [Bound with:] AULUS GELLIUS. Noctes Atticae. (Cologne), Eucharius Cervicornus [colophon: for Gottfried Hittorp], 1526. (12) ff., 202 pp., (13) ff. Same woodcut title page as the work above. Elaborate woodcut border on p. 1 incorporates figures of Agrippina and M. Agrippa, with the printer’s device at the foot. Woodcut head-..... More

A fine, separately published, French engraving of Webber's iconic scene of the tragic death of Captain James Cook in Hawaii.  The edition was dedicated to Louis-Antoine Bougainville, the French explorer and circumnavigator, who is herein identified as a member of the Society of the Cincinnati.  The official account of Cook's..... More