An attractive and genuine copy of the scarce  first edition of the “ most important” of Louis Hennepin’s writings (Howes),  his first published work, the first book to print the name “Louisiane,” and the earliest printed account of La Salle’s 1678-9 journey to what is now Illinois.  The word “Louisiane”..... More

Rare first illustrated edition (1603) of Cesare Ripa’s (c. 1560-c. 1622) emblem book.  A landmark compendium of allegorical personifications, his Iconologia, is a summa of ancient, medieval and early modern information on such images and a sourcebook of unparalleled richness which continues to guide artists and scholars more than four..... More

Extremely rare first and only edition of the French physician and mathematician François Demongenet’s important 1552 set of woodcut celestial and terrestrial globe gores, the starting point for what Dekker termed, “the Demongenet tradition in globe making” (p. 69) which would prevail for more than a century. These woodcut gores..... More

First edition of the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher’s (1602-80) extraordinary, extensively illustrated work on ‘optics’ in the most capacious sense, which discusses in detail shadow, color, refraction, projection, distortion and luminescence, vision, the eye, illusion, lens, instrumentation, automata, natural wonders, the very nature of images, etc., and also provides early..... More

Fine copy of a scarce 1508 third edition (first 1503, second 1504) of “the first modern encyclopedia to appear in print” (Smith, Rara Arithmetica, p. 83). Written in the popular didactic form of a Latin dialogue between master and pupil and enriched with an extensive program of (very lively) woodcuts..... More

Rare first edition of this important and graphically striking work on sixteenth-century fortification by Girolamo Portigiani (c. 1540-91). Consisting entirely of finely engraved images of star forts and details of their defensive systems, the volume is in fact as much a book about virtuoso perspective as it is an exploration..... More

Extra-illustrated and rare first and only edition of an unusual 17th-century treatise on the allegorical-mythological meaning of the constellations as conveyed by ancient authors, a work especially notable for its fine folding engraving of celestial globe gores derived from the design of Johannes Oterschaden (fl. c. 1600). The present copy..... More

Two engravings of melon plants plant from Johann Wilhelm Weinmann’s Phytanthoza Iconographia, “the first botanical book to use color printed mezzotint successfully” (Hunt). Johann Wilhelm Weinmann (1683-1741) was a German botanist and apothecary in Regensburg, and his monumental series represents the most innovative achievement in botanical illustration of its time. “The mezzotint process..... More

Rare, large-format engraved broadside produced in 1730 as part of the celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the Augsburg Confession (1530), one of the foundational documents of Lutheranism. The subject of the print is the famous Tranquebar Mission in southern India, which was established by King Frederick IV of Denmark..... More

Very rare color lithograph poster produced in conjunction with the Paris premier of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Otello. Verdi (1813-1901) had retired from opera after Aida in 1871, but his publisher, Giulo Ricordi (1840-1912), and the librettist Arrigo Boito (1842-1918) at last convinced him to return with Otello, which premiered on..... More