Continental

Contact Alex Day, Andrea Mazzocchi, Jonathan Harrison, Charlotte Miller or Sally Deegan

Our Continental department specialises in incunabula, Greek and Latin classics, early vernacular imprints, and notable texts from the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the early modern era, with a specific section devoted to medieval manuscripts, fragments, and illuminations.

We regularly issue lists and catalogues, offering a wide variety of literary, historical, and philosophical books printed in Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, the Low Countries, Eastern Europe, and Russia.  Woodcuts, early engravings, notable bindings, notable marginalia, rare manuscript or printed survivals, and books with a remarkable provenance are among our keenest interests and feature regularly in our stock.

 
  1. URCEO, Antonio [or Codro]. 

    Hoc Codri volumine haec continentur.  Orationes, seu sermones ut ipse appellabat.  Epistolae. ...

    Bologna, Giovanni Antonio Benedetti, 7 March 1502. 

    First edition of a quintessential piece of Italian humanism, annotated by a sixteenth-century reader particularly interested in the philology of the texts. 

    £3000

  2. VALERIUS FLACCUS, Gaius, and Louis CARRIO, translator

    Argonauticon … libri VIII, a Ludovico Carrione Brugensi...

    Antwerp, Christopher Plantin, [15 July] 1565. 

    First edition, a very attractive copy, of Louis Carrio’s precocious – and perhaps overconfident – recension of the first-century Argonautica of Valerius Flaccus. 

    £1250

  3. VALERIUS MAXIMUS.

    Dictorum et factorum memorabilium libri novem.

    [(Colophon:) Venice, Aldus Manutius, October 1502] [April 1503].

    First Aldine edition, variant ‘B’ with four additional leaves in quire A, with numerous early annotations.

    £2750

  4. VALLISNERI, Alberto Maria. 

    Lettioni venti sopra gli alti, et ineffabili misteri della Messa, in publico lette nella chiesa di...

    Milan, Giovanni Battista da Ponte & fratelli, 1567.

    Very rare first edition of a collection of twenty sermons on the Mass delivered by the Ferrarese Carmelite Vallisneri in the church of San Giovanni in Conca, Milan, dedicated to the city’s archbishop Cardinal Carlo Borromeo. 

    £500

  5. VELLEIUS PATERCULUS.

    Historiae Romanae duo volumina, ad M. Vinicium Cos. progenerum Tiberii Caesaris, per Beatum Rhenanum Selestadiensem...

    [(Colophon:) Basel, Johann Froben, November 1520.]

    Editio princeps of a summary history of Rome to AD 29 by the soldier-turned-historian Velleius Paterculus, edited from a now lost manuscript by the German humanist Beatus Rhenanus (1485–1547), with tipped-in notes by a contemporary student of Roman history displaying a remarkable concern...

    £2750

  6. VELLEIUS PATERCULUS.

    Quae supersunt ex historiae Romanae voluminibus duobus. Ex editione Petri Burmanni fideliter expressa.

    Glasgow, Robert and Andrew Foulis, 1752.

    First and only Foulis Press edition, unusually found here in a contemporary Scandinavian binding, evidence of the high esteem in which these products of the Glasgow enlightenment were held across Europe.

    £425

  7. VIGER, François.

    De praecipuis graecae dictionis idiotismis … accessit praeterea huic editioni observationum non inutilium qualecunque...

    London, G. Godbid for William Shrowsberey, 1678.

    Second London edition of this treatise on Greek idiom by the French Jesuit François Viger (1590–1647).

    £175

  8. [VIRGIL.]  RAMUS, Petrus (Pierre de la RAMÉE). 

    ...

    Paris, André Wechel, 1564. 

    Second editions of Ramus’s extensive commentaries on Virgil’s two poems on country life, written in reaction to the dry doctrines of several French schools who based their teaching of nature on Aristotle’s Physics.  Ramus wanted to keep in contact with the concrete realities of nature...

    £950

  9. [WALLET.]

    Wallet with manuscript and printed waste.

    France, c. 1790.

    An attractive late eighteenth-century wallet in the guise of a wallet-bound book, possibly re-using an earlier eighteenth-century binding, the interior compartments composed of manuscript and printed waste.

    £950

  10. [WALLPAPER BINDING.]

    ‘Chassereau des Biens et Rentes deves a joseph Paul Roegier et marie margu te [sic] Bourdeau son espouse,...

    Hainaut, 1750–1773.

    A manuscript account book compiled by Joseph Paul Roegier and his son, recording receipts over a quarter-century, in an attractive and unusual binding reusing a large fragment of gilt leather wallpaper.

    £3500

  11. WATTS, Isaac. 

    Psalms of David imitated in the Language of the New Testament … 

    Birmingham, Printed & sold by Knott and Lloyd. 1806. 

    Unrecorded Birmingham editions of Watts’s Hymns (first 1707) and Psalms (first 1719), both many times reprinted, especially in America.  The portrait of Watts was printed especially for this edition and is dated 10 October 1806. 

    £300

  12. WEBER, Johann Adam.

    Discursus curiosi et fructuosi [ad praecipuas totius litteraturae humanae scientias illustrandas accommodate …].

    [Salzburg, Johann Baptist Mayr, 1690.]

    Third Salzburg edition of Weber’s wide-ranging discourses, in a handsome Bavarian binding for the Abbot of Ettal, Bernhard I Oberhauser, attributable to the monk Brother Gregor, a trained bookbinder from Hungary.

    £6000

  13. WILSON, David (editor).

    A Collection of Psalm and Hymn Tunes, &c. in three Parts … 

    [Edinburgh:] Sold by the Editor at his House … and by J. Hamilton, Music Seller … [c.1800?].

    Second(?), expanded edition of this collection of (mostly) hymn tunes scored for treble, tenor, and bass. Though for most hymns the tunes only are printed, there are words for Cowper’s ‘Hark, my Soul!’ and one other, and at the end are the words and tunes for seven secular catches (in three...

    £500

  14. WITTKOWER, Jochanan.

    Agudath Perachim. ‘Blüthenstrauß’. Anthologie deutscher und hebräischer Gedichte für Geist und Herz …

    Altona, the Bonn Brothers for the author, 1880.

    First and only edition of this anthology of moral poems and satirical and edifying epigrams translated from German into Hebrew, as well as transcriptions and translations of epitaphs from the Jewish community of Altona, now a district of Hamburg.

    £350

  15. WORMALD, Francis; Jonathan ALEXANDER, editor.

    An Early Breton Gospel Book: A ninth-century Manuscript from the Collection of H.L....

    Cambridge, ‘Printed [at the University Press] for presentation to the Members of the Roxburghe Club’, 1977.

    First edition, dedicated and presented to the Roxburghe Club by Philip Bradfer-Lawrence, a member’s copy presented to Adrian McLaughlin.

    £175

  16. XENOPHON.

    De Cyri regis Persarum vita atque disciplina, libri VIII.

    Paris, Andreas Wechel, 1572.

    First edition of Joachim Camerarius’ Latin translation of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, a partly fictional work on the life and education of Cyrus the Great which served as a model for medieval and renaissance mirrors of princes, including Machiavelli’s Il Principe. A beautiful...

    £875

  17. ZACHARIÄ, Just Friedrich Wilhelm.

    Les quatre parties du jour, poëme traduit de l’allemand de M. Zacharie.

    Paris, J. B. G. Musier fils, 1769.

    First edition in French of this proto-Romantic poem on the times of day, splendidly bound with the arms of its dedicatee, the mentally ill Christian VII of Denmark and Norway.

    £1500

  18. ZAMPELIOS, Spiridion.

    Βυζαντιναι Μελεται [Byzantine Studies]...

    Athens, Christos Nikolaidos, 1857.

    First edition. Spyros Zampelios was a champion of the continuity theory in the history of the Greek nation in the crucial decades of the mid nineteenth century, and the first Greek historian to adopt a tripartite examination of historical periods, divided into ancient, medieval and modern Hellenism....

    £350

  19. ZANCHI, Basilio.

    Dictionarium poeticum, et epitheta veterum poetarum … nunc secondo trans Alpes editum.

    Mons, Luca Rivius, 1612.

    Scarce Mons-printed edition of Zanchi’s classical onomasticon from A to Z, providing a comprehensive list of deities, notable figures, and locations from the works of Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, Ovid, and Propertius.

    £375

  20. ZARLINO, Gioseffo.

    Le Istitutioni harmoniche … nelle quali; oltra le materie appartenenti alla musica; si trovano dichiarati...

    Venice, [Pietro da Fino], 1558.

    First edition, rare, of ‘arguably the most important and influential book in the history of music theory … [It] opened the way for the new tonality which has governed music from the seventeenth century to the present day’ (PMM).

    £15000