First edition of a treatise, chiefly comprising letters and essays, providing an in-depth discussion of the discovery and promulgation of a technique for extracting oil from beech nuts. Beech nuts were particularly plentiful in England and their oil was both simple to extract and useful as fuel and for many..... More

Finely illuminated, early 18th-century Venetian manuscript issued by the city’s Magistrato alla Sanità (Health Department) as a license to certify the physician Antonio Damugliano (d. 1747) to practice medicine in the Venetian Republic using his propriety formula for topical salves (balsami) to treat “wounds and ulcers” (f. 3v-3r). The manuscript..... More

Rare compilation of anti-Jesuit apocrypha: the famous ‘Monita secreta’ is found here alongside a purported condemnation of the Jesuits by the Faculty of Theology in Paris in 1554, as well as a translation of a prophecy of Saint Hildegaarde commonly seen as fortelling the fall of the Order. The present..... More

A fine pen-and-ink drawing and a very rare letterpress broadside, both relating to the baker’s trade in 18th-century Brussels. The drawing depicts St. Honoratus of Amiens (d. c. 600), a bishop saint who came to be especially venerated by bakers in France following the donation of land by the Parisian..... More

A fresh and bright example of this rare separately issued version of Giovanni Battista Falda’s (1643-78) important 1667 two-sheet plan of Rome (called the pianta piccola), republished during the first half of the 18th century by the Amsterdam publishers Johannes Covens (1697-1774) and Cornelis Mortier (1699-1783). “Falda’s pianta piccola was..... More

Rare first and only edition of one of the first, if not the first Western monograph devoted to a Russian work of art, namely the icon of the 4th-century warrior saint Theodore Straelates housed in the Rieterkirche St. Marien und Christophorus in Kalbensteinberg, Bavaria, an important pilgrimage church located on..... More

Rare first edition of this illustrated handbook of practical geometry and surveying equipment. The engineer supplies a panorama of the instruments used by city planners and surveyors in the early 18th C for leveling land, measuring dikes and embankments, calculating elevation and distance, etc. Following a primer on basic geometry..... More

First edition of this important work on the measurement on light by “the father of photometry” (DSB) and the author’s first work on the subject. “Bouguer’s achievement was to see that the eye could be used, not as a meter but as a null indicator, i.e., to establish the equality..... More

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