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

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

Rare first edition of the first publication on optics (perspectiva), and a crucial text that was studied by Leonardo da Vinci. Johannes de Peckham’s (England c. 1230-1292) Perspectiva communis is illustrated with 77 woodcut diagrams depicting the human eye, the nature of vision, and the eye’s role in the representation..... 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

A rare survival of such an ephemeral piece (unrecorded on ICCU): a large broadside issued during the nine-month occupation of Rome following the fall of the Roman Republic, and proclaiming a complete revision of the running of the city’s public market to prevent “hoarders and scalpers” from inflating food prices..... More

First edition of Galileo’s most important work, the foundation of modern physics. This work was Galileo’s ‘greatest scientific achievement … Mathematicians and physicists of the later seventeenth century, Isaac Newton among them, rightly supposed that Galileo had begun a new era in the science of mechanics. It was upon his..... More

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

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