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

Rare first edition of this portrait book of members of the Venetian Accademia degli Incogniti, representing a Who’s Who of the more libertine and belligerent literati of early 17th-century northern Italy: of particular interest to women’s studies and the history of music. In total 106 members are listed each with..... More

Scarce Strasburg edition of the collected works of Lull, including commentaries of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, and here with an important 17th-century presentation of the Lullian Ars by the encyclopedist Johann Alsted. Both were influential on Leibniz, Commenius and other 17th-century encyclopedists. "The most distinctive characteristic of Lull's Art is..... More

A very large-margined example of the first edition of the first printed atlas of Crete (Il Regno of Candia), for many centuries Venice’s stronghold in the eastern Mediterranean and the last significant overseas possession of its once great maritime empire.  Complete with 61 engraved maps and plans of the island..... More

Stunning copy of this "important and influential history of the Ottoman Empire, based on an important collection of source material, which includes Leonard of Chios letter on the fall of Constantinople, Spandugino's account of Ottoman life and manners, and the accounts of Giovio, Menavino, Barletius and others.- Atabey 1088 The..... More

First collected edition of Galileo’s works, appearing only a year after his death and of great interest for his 17th-century reception: this was the edition in which Newton and later eminent scientists read their Galileo. Included here are not only most of the seminal pieces written and published over a...... More

Scarce augmented edition of this work on the theory of machines and the nature of gravity by the young Jesuit Paolo Casati. The work imaginatively envisions a Latin dialogue between three great physicists of the preceding generation, all recently dead in the 1640s: Galileo; Marin Mersenne, his greatest champion outside..... More

Extremely rare group of anatomical pamphlets in first Latin edition by Lodewijk de Bils, a nobleman from Flanders, who advertised a method of turning bodies into transparent teaching tools preserved and embalmed in a wax-like substance. The sammelband includes his treatises on the gall-bladder (Epistolica Dissertatio) and on the dissection..... More

First edition (? see below) of Becher’s popular alchemical handbook, which “rapidly became a standard text on elements, principles, and chemical processes” (DSB II.550) containing an engraved representation of the Prague Medal as well as a title engraving of the chemist with allegorical figures. “Becher’s views on chemistry have much..... More

Scarce first edition of Riccioli’s anti-Copernican, Tychonic geo-centrist cosmology, presenting an astronomy cleared (so he claims) of theoretical as well as observational errors. It is considered a conclusion to the Almagestum novum of 1651. “Riccioli described sunspots, compiled star catalogues, and recorded his observation of a double star; he also..... More

Extremely rare German edition (a Latin edition was published the same year) of Sturm’s enlargement of Habrecht’s famous treatise on the making of celestial and terrestrial globes, published in 1628. The Habrecht family of clock and instrument makers were famous throughout Europe from the last quarter of the sixteenth century to..... More

Scarce first and only edition of this work on Danish antiquities, of considerable interest for the history of astronomy for containing extensive material on Tycho Brahe and his island observatory. The fact that the astronomer receives such extensive attention in a work in which the spotlight would normally be focused..... More

First edition of a rare and fundamental handbook for seventeenth-century missionaries to Indochina.  The volume is a formative document by François Pallu (d. 1684) and Pierre Lambert de la Motte (d. 1679), founding members of the Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris and driving forces behind the establishment in 1665..... More