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

Rare first and only edition of the catalogue for the sale in 1798 of the library of Charles-Pierre Claret de Fleurieu (1738-1810), the French explorer and hydrographer, who was Minister of the Navy under Louis XVI, a member of the Institut de France, and who collaborated with Ferdinand Berthoud (1727-1807)... 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

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 edition of the authoritative eyewitness account of one of the great legal (and media) sensations of the British Empire during the early 19th century, the infamous 1806 trial of Thomas Picton (1758-1815), former Governor of Trinidad, who was accused of illegally ordering the torture in 1801 of... 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

Rare augmented edition of this analytic catalogue of the contents of the botanical garden at Bologna by Gaetano Monti, radically revising the 1724 edition of his father, Giuseppe Monti. The earlier publication employed Tournefort’s classificatory system, organizing plants according to structure of fruit and flower, but the younger Monti here..... More

Rare first edition of this landmark of cryptography, “the first printed book on the subject” (Kahn), here in an example heavily annotated in several early modern hands, with its two woodcut title pages decorated in contemporary hand-color, and all preserved in a fine, stamped German binding dated 1587. The only..... More

Rare first edition of this deluxe, illustrated atlas folio published in 1939 as an advance prospectus showcasing the architecture of the Esposizione Universale di Roma, the world’s fair planned for 1942 to celebrate twenty years of Fascism under Benito Mussolini. Because of the outbreak of World War II the fair... More

Extremely rare 18th-century pamphlet listing and describing 13 machines recently invented by Carlo Castelli (active 1780-1810s), emeritus professor of physics, member of several learned scientific academies, and Provost of the Collegiata della Sta. Maria Fulcorina in Milan. The 4-page prospectus notes that these inventions are available for order from the... More

Rare 1886 (2nd) edition of this copiously illustrated drawing manual from 19th-century Paris, first penned in 1873 on the eve of the rise of Impressionism and intended to help artists working outside of the academy to become familiar with the fundamentals of perspective, the wide variety of drawing materials and... More