Only recorded copy of a very early illustrated edition (3rd) of this anonymous collection of ‘nouvelles,’ a literary genre presenting brief prose narratives taken from bourgeois life. The Parangon des nouvelles honnestes utiles et delectables, following the famous Les cent nouvelles nouvelles (c. 1460), collected vernacular tales purporting to be..... More
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
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 The work is at least partly based upon the unpublished notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci: According to A.P. Usher, several inventions formerly ascribed to Besson are derived.....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
![Opera,comprising:]De venarum ostiolis. Hieronymus FABRICIUS](/pictures/thumb/203.jpg?v=1548787672)
First editions of these four tracts (the second, De locutione, is the first folio edition; see below), including Girolamo Fabrizio’s (c. 1533-1619) two most important works, the De venarum ostiolis, and the De formato foetu. The De venarum ostiolis is one of the great rarities of anatomical literature: Fabrizio’s discovery..... 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
First English edition of this eyewitness anthropological account of the Americas, chiefly Inca Peru and Aztec Mesoamerica, by the Jeusit father José de Acosta, “a more thoughtful and a more thorough account of the Indian world than anything then available” (Pagden). Acosta’s crowning achievement in the present volume is his..... 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
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
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
![Tractatus Primus [-Secundus -Tertius] Instrumentorum Mechanicorum. Joost BÜRGI, Levinus /...](/pictures/thumb/4827.jpg?v=1508791139)
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
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
![Ex curationibus observationes quibus videre ets [sic] morbos…. Paul de RENEAULME](/pictures/thumb/5744.jpg?v=1537296270)
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
Very rare first edition of one of the earliest “auto-bibliographies” by a Jesuit, the highly learned controversialist Jakob Gretser, one of the most prolific of Jesuit authors. Gretser explains in the preface that he compiled this bibliography of his own works following requests for such a catalogue from people in..... 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
The second augmented edition of Galileo’s classic on hydrostatics, published the same year within months of the first edition, represents his first published work in physics (Drake, p. 179). The Discorso is hailed by historians of science as having united for the first time two previously separate disciplines: statics and..... 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
Extremely rare first and only edition of the mannerist printmaker Pierre Vallet’s (c. 1575-1657) celebrated illustrated adaptation of Heliodorus of Emesa’s Greek novel Aethiopica (or Theagenes and Chariclea) (c. 250 A.D.?). The volume contains, in addition to its engraved title page, 120 exquisite narrative etchings/engravings, one for each page of..... 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
Rare first edition, first issue, of the defense of James I’s execution of Sir Walter Raleigh, written by Francis Bacon and 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..... More
Scarce edition of three alchemical texts—comprising the first illustrated appearance of the ‘Twelve Keys’ of Basil Valentine, and the first printed editions of Thomas Norton’ The Ordinall of Alchemy, and John Cremer’s ‘Testament’—collected by the pre-eminent Rosicrucian apologist Maier. The first work shows the intimate dependency of 17th-century alchemy and..... 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 first and only edition of this illustrated funeral book recording the ceremonies for Pope Paul V (1550-1621) held in Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, with a fine suite of full-page engravings of ephemeral sculpture and architecture, including a series of 16 sculptures of Virtues by the great Gian Lorenzo..... More
Rare contemporary Portuguese account of the Dutch conquest in May 1624 of the principal Brazilian city, Salvador da Bahia, a brief victory that was reversed less than a year later by the largest armada ever sent to the Americas. This Dutch attempt to establish a colony in Brazil was the..... More
Rare first and only edition, first issue, of the Vicenza architect Ottavio Revesi Bruti’s (c. 1585-1648) richly illustrated folio describing his new instrument for accurately constructing scale drawings of the architectural orders without reliance on laborious calculations, a boon both for practical architects eager to avoid difficult mathematics on the..... More