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

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

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

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

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 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 first French edition of the earliest written eyewitness account of Japan, possibly made by the first European to visit that country. The Portuguese adventurer Mendes Pinto went to India in 1537, and spent some years pirating on the coasts of Burma, South-east Asia and China. He claims to have..... 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

First edition, and evidently the most complete copy extant, of this calligraphy manuel by a Genoese writing master. Notwithstanding its rich mercantile culture and the educational infrastructure that supported it, few such manuals were published in Genoa. Of five other copies listed by Becker, that described in Marzoli is the..... More

Rare first edition of Pierre Gassendi’s (1592-1655) important illustrated treatise on inertial mechanics. Written in the form of two letters addressed to the scholar and keeper of the king’s library Pierre Depuy (1582-1651), the De motu impresso “contains the first precise published formulation of the principle of inertia” as recently..... More

Second edition of Aleotti's Italian translation of Hero's Pneumatics, and like the author's related title on automata, of interest for 17th-century theatrical machinery and festival productions. The mechanical wonders of the school of Alexandria gave the Renaissance Vitruvian architect engineer the sources he needed, for example, for garden automata; for..... More