The first separately published edition of a short tract in parallel Italian and Latin by the Italian mathematician Benedetto Maria Castrone on Vauban’s theory of fortification. Published in the same year that the city of Palermo (the place of this book’s publication) adopted Vauban’s regular polygonal trace, the treatise had..... More

Scarce first and sole edition of the author’s first work: an elaborate treatise on the Chinese [South Mandarin] language, “the second grammar to be published in Europe, preceded only by Bayer’s grammatical account [St. Petersburg, 1730]” (Löwendahl).  As the first work printed with engraved Chinese type in France, Fourmont’s Meditationes..... More

Two engravings of melon plants plant from Johann Wilhelm Weinmann’s Phytanthoza Iconographia, “the first botanical book to use color printed mezzotint successfully” (Hunt). Johann Wilhelm Weinmann (1683-1741) was a German botanist and apothecary in Regensburg, and his monumental series represents the most innovative achievement in botanical illustration of its time. “The mezzotint process..... More

The only known copy in the world of a legal apology urging to void the ruling of the minister of the Royal Court Juan Curiel (1690-1775) and reinstate the right of the Gran Compañia del Rio y Muelle de Sevilla [the Great Company of the River and Dock of Seville]..... More

Rare first and sole edition of this encyclopedic illustrated survey applying the latest mathematical methods to theoretical as well as practical sciences (e.g. geography), by the 22 year old cartographer Mayer. The work was published shortly before the author joined the Homann Cartographic Bureau, where he served as one of..... More

Very rare illustrated edition (second; first c. 1685) of this poem on the siege of Vienna, along with Dialogues between Men and Women on daily life (La Banzuola). The two compositions form the most extensive and most philologically genuine literary compositions in Bolognese dialect. First published c. 1685 with six..... More

A very rare account, illustrated with a folding plate of the catafalque, of the elaborate funeral arrangements of Philip V of Spain (1683-1746), which took place between July and November 1746. Philip died on July 9, 1746 and was succeeded by his son Ferdinand VI, to whom Tiernos suspiros is..... More

Rare first edition – illustrated with a fine folding etched map – of the hydraulic engineer Jean-André Floquet’s project proposal for the ‘Canal de Provence,’ a waterway intended to link Marseille with Aix-en-Provence and the Durance River to the north. The etched map is a reduced-size version of an exceptionally..... More

Rare first edition, complete with its separately issued supplement, of this early treatise on lines of magnetism, including an attempt to explain the origin of these forces by a theory of vortices, and illustrated with 20 folding etchings. The problem of describing and calculating what would become known as magnetic..... 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

First edition, second state, of this rare work on growing, curing, packaging and selling tobacco, written for the benefit of farmers in the Papal States who had two years earlier been given permission to cultivate it. Much of the information is based on methods of tobacco cultivation in Maryland and..... More

Rare first edition of the funeral-book of Maria Barbara of Portugal, Queen-consort of Spain and wife of Ferdinand VI, with a large folding plate of her catafalque. As with many books of exequies for European monarchs printed in America, the volume appeared over a year after the Queen’s death in..... More

First edition – and fine copy – of Piranesi’s incomparable reconstruction of 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..... More