Very rare, separately published 17th-century etching depicting one of the most iconic – and certainly one of the most misogynistic – scenes relating to the querelle des femmes (or “the woman question”) in Early Modern France. This extraordinarily bizarre print depicts the shop of the fictional blacksmith Lustucru, who ran..... 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

This rare handbook by the renowned sculptor-goldsmith-theorist Juan de Arfe y Villafañe (1535-1600) – not to be confused with the author’s similar title of 1572 – presents the most influential information on the assaying of silver, gold, gemstones and a variety of other commodities published on the Iberian peninsula during..... More

First edition (12mo) of Rousseau’s classic treatise on education, illustrated with 5 full-page engravings. Émile provides Rousseau’s most widely read statement on the essential goodness of human nature, tracing the natural development of a child brought up in the country in accordance with nature and free from the corrupting influence..... More

Set of 3 very rare 18th-century sales catalogues – unrecorded in American libraries – from the emporium of the Leipzig art dealer C. C. H. Rost (d. 1798), including his richly illustrated inventory of plaster casts made after the “best original” statues from Greco-Roman antiquity, among which are actual size..... More

First edition of an historically important volume describing the Dendera Affair, the Egyptian archaeological expedition of 1820 led by Saulnier, an antiquarian and treasure-hunter, and J.-B. Lelorrain, the master mason he hired to remove the bas-relief zodiac from Egypt’s Temple of Dendera and smuggle it to Paris. Until it was..... 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

Extensive sammelband of 17 early 19th-century Italian agricultural treatises relating to exotic crops, pest control, farm storage, seed scattering, etc. Cotton, peanuts, potatoes, wheat, swedes (a root vegetable popular in England), clover, apples, and other crops are discussed, as is an American decorative annual, Madia sativa, which appears to have..... More

Extraordinary compendium of very rare, official letterpress documents (several of which are unrecorded and none of which is held in U.S. collections) and manuscript items collected during the 1820s and early 1830s by Giambattista Ferraris (fl. 1820’s -30’s), a prison doctor in the northern Italian town of Biella. The volume..... More

Very rare first and only edition (just 2 examples in U.S. libraries) of an illustrated work describing the erection in 1731 of an ephemeral triumphal arch in Livorno designed by the Florentine architect Ferdinando Ruggieri (1687-1741) at the request of the English merchant community stationed there. The monumental arch, over..... More