Extraordinary manuscript of a 16th-century relación written in Chile that provides an account of a 1540 shipwreck in the Straits of Magellan and describes the travails faced by the survivors during their long sojourn in the South American wilderness. Itself a remarkable record of an early Spanish voyage to the..... More

Very rare first edition of Argenti’s detailed eyewitness account of the religious turmoil resulting in the destruction in 1603 of the Jesuit College in Claudiopolis, Transylvania (modern-day Cluj-Napoca, Romania) by hostile Protestant forces. A manuscript of this letter is housed at the Biblioteca Vacelliana in Rome. In the present letter..... More

First edition of a rare and enigmatic text with its origins in a Persian-language travel diary of Uruch Beg Bayat (1560-1605), a nobleman and secretary in the delegation sent to Europe in 1599 by the Safavid ruler Shah ‘Abbas I at the urging of Sir Anthony Sherley (1565-1635), whose own..... More

Extremely rare first edition of the first French account of the East Indies to appear in print (cf. Lach & van Kley, III: 373), here in an impeccable copy bound in contemporary vellum. The work is that of the French adventurer François Martin de Vitré (c. 1575-c. 1631), who, upon..... More

Extremely rare first and only French edition (first Italian: 1592) of this satirical work on the nobility of the ass by one of the major musical theorists of the early Baroque. This is the earliest extant work and by far the most successful by Banchieri (1568-1634). The work ran into..... More

[BOUND WITH:][GALILEI, Galileo & CASTELLI, Benedetto]. Risposta alle Opposizioni del S. Lodovico delle Colombe, e del S. Vincenzo di Grazia... Florence, Cosimo Giunti, 1615. (1) ff, (2), 319 [i.e. 335] pp., with numerous mispaginations, [5] including printer’s emblem.  The second augmented edition of Galileo’s classic on hydrostatics, published the same..... More

Rare first edition, first issue, of Francis Bacon’s defense of the execution of Sir Walter Raleigh by James I, with (according to Bacon) “very material” additions by the king himself. The work describes the circumstances surrounding Raleigh’s final voyage to America in 1618 with the purpose of locating a fabled..... More

Very rare first edition of a set of engravings by the Antwerp printmaker Jean-Baptiste Barbé (1578-1649) after the designs of Theodoor van Loon (c.1581-1649), a Flemish painter noted as an early stylistic follower of Caravaggio (1571-1610). The work presents bust-length portraits of the Holy Family, the Four Evangelists, and the..... More

Scarce first edition and an attractive copy, bound in what must be a presentation binding with the image of Saint Benedict stamped on the front cover and the arms of the author stamped on the back cover. The work is one of the more fanciful illustrated chronicles devoted to the..... More

Rare editions of two works important for bringing the new computational technique of Briggs and Napier to the Continent. The first work is considered the second edition of Briggs exposition of his own as well as Napier's treatment of the logarithm (first 1624): "[It] included thirty thousand logarithms, those from..... More

Very rare first edition of a treatise by the Dutch autodidact astronomer Martin Hortensius (or van den Hove) (1605-39) refuting Johannes Kepler’s (1571-30) criticism of his measurements concerning the angular diameter of the sun. The two men first disputed this observational problem following Hortensius’ publication of his findings in the..... 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

First edition of a text providing new applications for logarithms, the new computational tool by Napier that Cavalieri had recently introduced in Italy. Cavalieri opens by solving 16 problems in planar and 10 problems in spherical geometry, followed by a set of axioms and definitions. Having laid the groundwork, he..... More