Extremely rare ephemeral Bosinada [popular verse in Milanese dialect – see below]  in honor of Sophie Blanchard (1778–1819), the first professional female balloonist on the occasion of her solo flight August 15, 1811, organized for the celebrations of Napoleon's birthday in Milan. The balloon left Milan on the evening of..... More

The very rare first edition of this suite of 24 engravings representing the life of Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582), designed by the prominent Antwerp engravers and print publishers Adriaen Collaert (c. 1560-1618) and Cornelis Galle I (1576-1650), issued on the eve of the beatification of Teresa in 1614. Following her..... More

Rare first edition of a Hebrew/Latin/Dutch pocket-lexicon, compiled by Johannes Leusden, a follower of the famous philologist and Christian Hebraist Johannes Buxtorf (1564-1629), who chaired Hebrew studies at Basel for over thirty years. The volume is comprised of four parts, with Leusden’s two philological works preceded by a supplement.  The..... More

Very rare (no US copy) fascinating illustrated broadside sold in Rome during the pandemic of 1656-57, presenting through a series of “snapshots” of the city at this dramatic moment in time a rich and varied iconography of its response to the plague. Printed by Giacomo Molinari and sold in the..... 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