Rare first edition in Spanish of the most influential illustrated technological compendium of the Renaissance, “the first independent work on machinery published” (Zeitlinger). The work is at least partly based upon the unpublished notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci: According to A.P. Usher, several inventions formerly ascribed to Besson are derived..... 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

An extraordinary volume – previously unrecognized in bibliographic scholarship – which once formed part of the library of George Sandys (1578-1644), the poet, traveler, colonial treasurer of the Virginia Company, and “one of the most important men in the history of Colonial Jamestown” (Grizzard, p. 193), whose English verse translation..... More

Scarce first Latin edition (following the original German by a year) of one of the most widely diffused Northern European surveying and drafting books, of great interest for the history of scale drawing, architectural drafting, and precision instrumentation, by the Flemish-born polymath and instrument maker Levinus Hulsius (1546-1606). The third..... More

Very rare first and only edition of an early important collection of 201 medical case-studies, or observationes, by the physician and botanist Paul de Reneaulme (1560-1624), a native of Blois, who is best remembered for his finely illustrated work on plants, the Specimen historiae plantarum (1611). The present work, notable..... More

Rare 1611 (second) edition of The Noble art of Venerie or Hunting, an important and “beautifully illustrated handbook” treating all aspects of Elizabethan hunting and which “influenced a broad range of readers in early modern England” (Hamrick, 9). The work is largely a translation of Jacques de Fouilloux’s “astoundingly popular..... More

Scarce, French-language edition of Du Laurens'works, with a set of 26 anatomical engravings derived from Vesalius and others. "This is the second edition of the French translation of Du Laurens' collected works... which preceeded the publication of the Latin text. In addition to the author's textbook of anatomy and his..... More

First edition of the most influential seventeenth-century edition of Archimedes’ complete works. The work contains the Greek text with a Latin “trot” running alongside and has extensive exegetical notes. It was still regarded as the best edition in 1670 when Sturm made his German translation. “The success of the humanist..... 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

A later edition of the Secrets of Signora Isabella Cortese, an important publication on practical alchemy, written by a female author and addressed to female readers. “Cortese’s recipes for beauty waters, soaps, and perfumes, along with others for calcinated mercury and potable gold, are deemed useful to ‘every noble lady’..... 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

First collected edition of this landmark of discovery Americana, augmented with new material and, above all, the first appearance of Champlain’s seminal two-sheet map of the Great Lakes. This copy comes in the rare first issue of both text and map, in a splendid contemporary red morocco binding with the..... More

Rare first and only edition of a treatise on trigonometry – illustrated with numerous woodcut diagrams – by James Hume of Godscroft, a Scottish mathematician living in Paris. The work includes information on logarithms as recently discovered by John Napier in 1614 (including a folding table of logarithms based on..... More