Rare early edition of this famous work on sculpture, perspective and the aesthetic theory of the plastic arts, of particular importance for the diffusion of perspective theory to the north of Florence according to Kemp, who characterises the work’s technical innovations as “a curious mélange of the Albertian method, using..... More

Rare and most likely the earliest acquirable edition of the municipal laws of Ferrara, one of the richest and most cultivated of Northern Italian courts, published shortly after the concluding session of the Council of Trent (1563). This publication significantly revises the previous publication of local statutory law, and is signed..... 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

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

Extremely rare copy of a classic work produced in 1661 during Japan’s intellectual awakening by the important mathematician Isomura Yoshinori (d. 1710). This much enlarged third edition (1684) includes new uses for pi, such as novel calculations of the surface of a sphere. It solves other practical problems, for instance..... More

First edition of the noted Lübeck architect, painter & draftsman Paul Heinecken’s (1674-1746) richly illustrated work on the practical applications of perspective to the broader fields of architecture, sculpture, and the pictorial arts, and a book considered to be “one of the most beautiful comprehensive ‘monumental’ treatises written in the..... More

Very rare illustrated edition (second; first c. 1685) of this poem on the siege of Vienna, along with Dialogues between Men and Women on daily life (La Banzuola). The two compositions form the most extensive and most philologically genuine literary compositions in Bolognese dialect. First published c. 1685 with six..... More

Rare first French edition (first German: 1759) of this account of Charles XII’s exile in Turkey, published on the request of Voltaire to supplement his biography of the monarch and validate it vis-à-vis the rival biography published by Nordberg. Baron de Fabrice (1683-1759) had accompanied the Swedish king during his..... More

Very rare first edition of de Pommelles’ groundbreaking study of the population of France and its bearing on provincial militia quotas, important for the application of statistics to the study of large groups. Just before the Revolution, the lieutenant-colonel Chevalier de Pommelles combined the concerns of the contemporary enlightened mind..... More

Intriguing over-life-size painting of a female allegorical sculpture set in an architectural niche, a rare surviving example of a type of ephemeral decoration most closely associated with the scenography of the neoclassical theater and with the (often elaborate) temporary festival structures especially popular in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth..... More