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

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

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 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

First edition – and fine copy – of Piranesi’s incomparable reconstruction Rome’s Campus Martius, a work famed for its archaeological ambition, its graphic inventiveness, and as a sourcebook for the architectural imagination which continues to influence architectural theorists and practitioners today. “An exceptional personality, Piranesi transfigured his personal failure as..... 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

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