The very rare first edition of this extraordinary 17th-century pocket-sized star atlas designed for the use of students making nighttime observations in the field. Published during a time of remarkable astronomical discoveries after the invention and revolutionary use of the telescope by Galileo and his contemporaries, this handy guide became..... More

Very rare first edition of the Jesuit scientist Ignace-Gaston Pardies’ (1636-73) beautifully engraved folio celestial atlas, here in a deluxe copy with its 6 double-page charts in fine contemporary hand-color and its some 1500 stars, nebulae and comets individually illuminated in gold. Examples of the atlas typically consist of only..... More

Rare 1602 Frankfurt edition (following only the 1601 Paris edition) of this early illustrated treatise on ideal urban planning in the wake of two important early modern cultural/technological developments, namely, the rise of Protestantism as a force with its own requirements for a built environment and the development of bastion..... More

Rare first and only edition of this 1749 prospectus advertising the production of 2 large globes to be constructed according to the most up-to-date mathematical, geographical and astronomical information. These terrestrial and celestial globes, each measuring 3 feet in diameter, were designed by the newly founded Societé Cosmographique (Cosmographische Gesellschaft)..... More

A spectacular copy of the final edition of the English Pilot, The Fourth Book, the first wholly English sea atlas of American waters. The work was sufficiently in demand to justify 37 legitimate editions from 1689 to 1794 and three pirated editions. All editions are rare. During the history of..... More

Rare first edition of this Spanish translation of the life of Queen Maria Ana of Portugal. For a period of 8 years during her husband’s illness, Maria Ana controlled one of the most powerful European empires of the 18th century, and, according to Ritter, took a special interest in missionary..... More

Very rare suite of 58 late 16th- and early 17th-century engraved portraits of contemporary Western European, Eastern European and Ottoman sovereigns, princes, military figures, and other (sometimes quite bizarre) personages, both male and female, produced in Rome by the publishers Giovanni Orlandi (fl. 1590s, d. 1640) and Andrea Vaccari (fl..... 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

The first attempt at a comprehensive bibliography of D’Anville’s production of maps and books.  Many of the citations are annotated.  D’Anville was one of the great French cartographers of the eighteenth century.  He was the author of 211 maps and plans.  “His maps of China, drawn at the request of..... More

Exceedingly rare undated edition (see below) of this report on central Luzón by Ustariz, provincial of the Dominican Order in the Philippines, focusing especially on the Paniqui Indians. A summary of the contents is included in the Blair/Robertson anthology of the most important primary documents of Philippine history: “In Paniqui..... More

Rare first and only edition of the antiquary Conte Paolo Vimercati-Sozzi’s (1801-83) guide (1840) for visitors to his recently opened museum in Bergamo, an intriguing instance of the Kunst- and Wunderkammer tradition of collecting persisting well into the 19th century in parallel with the rise of modern museology. Preserved in..... More

Rare, separately issued plan of Quebec City, here in fine original hand color, published in London in 1759 by the prominent architect Edward Oakley (fl. 1730-66), an intriguing figure whose varied practical and theoretical roles in the London architectural world provide a glimpse into the diversity of professional building practice..... More

First and only known edition of a German Baroque calligraphy manual for young students.  Following the title page, in which the elaborately scripted title is flanked by a pair of winged cherubs, this slim volume begins with a demonstration of the accretive written symbol system common in 18th-century German and..... More