A fine copy of the first French edition of Wright brothers' report from March 12, 1906 to the secretary of the recently created Aero Club of America, recording the longest flight in history at the time. This French edition was published the same year that the Wright brothers traveled to..... More

First edition of a treatise, chiefly comprising letters and essays, providing an in-depth discussion of the discovery and promulgation of a technique for extracting oil from beech nuts. Beech nuts were particularly plentiful in England and their oil was both simple to extract and useful as fuel and for many..... More

A full-sheet Oxford Almanack for the year 1800 with lists of the kings of England starting from William the Conqueror and of the officers of the university. It is illustrated with an etching designed by Edward Dayes (1763-1804) and executed by James Basire (1730-1802). The text was engraved by James..... 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

Extremely rare first edition (second issue, a year after the first) of this exposition on the drawing methods of Jean-François Le Breton, a respected drawing master in 19th century Paris. The present work is of special interest, having been wholly composed and lithographed by two women, one of whom was..... More

Extremely rare pamphlet issued by the Parliamentary printer, P. G. Simon, summarizing the scandalous case and fitting punishment of Mme. Fougereux, convicted of having ‘tenu lieu public chez elle depuis un temps considerable’ – of having run a brothel for a considerable amount of time.   Amidst the heyday of..... More

The expanded, third edition (1866-first; 1869-second) of a very rare publication on late nineteenth century German beer making on the eve of the invention of pasteurization. Thanks to technological advances, the second half of the nineteenth century saw a boom in the industrialization of beer-making, marked by the opening of..... 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