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. FARINGTON, Susan Maria (illustrator). 

    The 104th Psalm.  Illustrated by Susan Maria Ffarington.  Worden. 

    London,  Vincent Brooks Day & Son, [c. 1867]. 

    The Faringtons or Ffaringtons were an ancient family of Worden Hall, Leyland, Lancashire, with a substantial family archive.  Susan Maria (1808–1894) edited The Farington Papers for the Chetham Society in 1856, and made other contributions to local history, but this unusual panorama seems to have...

    £650

  2. [AQUHORTIES.]

    Abstract of the Rules and Regulations for the Students in the College of Aquhorties …

    Edinburgh, Printed by J. Moir, Paterson’s Court, [1799?].

    Broadside rules for the newly established Aquhorties College, the only Roman Catholic college in Scotland, presumably designed to be posted up around the school.

    £850

  3. EUCLID.

    Στοιχειων βιβλ. ιε εκ των θεωνος συνουσιων. Εις του αυτου του πρωτον,...

    Basel, Johannes Herwagen, September 1533.

    Editio princeps of Euclid, the ‘oldest mathematical textbook still in common use today’ (PMM), a work which ‘has exercised an influence upon the human mind greater than that of any other work except the Bible’ (DSB).

    £18000

  4. 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

  5. [FUNERAL SERMONS.]

    Annotated sammelband of eleven eulogies, a discourse, and an address, with additional manuscript material bound in.

    [Paris, 1682–1692.]

    A sammelband of funeral sermons for distinguished women and men of the late seventeenth century, published in Paris between 1682 and 1692, thoroughly annotated by a cleric for use in his preaching and interspersed with early seventeenth-century manuscript material mostly relating to the bishopric...

    £1200

  6. [ANTIPHONAL.]

    Antiphonal, with neumes, containing music for the blessing of the Paschal Candle on Holy Saturday.

    Southern Germany or Bohemia, mid-fifteenth century.

    An unusual and striking antiphonal leaf written entirely in red and notated entirely in burnished gold, signalling the importance of the text for Holy Saturday.

    £3500

  7. DIONYSIUS of Halicarnassus.

    Antiquitatum Rom. libri XI. Ab Aemylio Porto recens & post aliorum interpretationes Latine redditi.

    Geneva, Jacob Stoer, 1614.

    A rare pocket-sized edition of Dionysius of Halicarnassus on the early history of Rome, in an armorial binding for Adrien Poërier.

    £450

  8. APOLLODORUS; Benedetto EGIO, translator.

    Απολλοδωρου του Αθηναιου γραμματικου βιβλιοθηκης,...

    [Heidelberg,] ex officina Commeliniana, 1599.

    Second edition (first 1555) of this classic compendium of Greek myths and legends by Apollodorus, edited by Hieronymus Commelinus (1550–1597) and published posthumously by his heirs. The Greek text is accompanied by the Latin translation of Benedetto Egio, and is prefixed with Commelinus’...

    £875

  9. ‘PIETRO da VICOVARO’, i.e. Giuseppe CORTESE.

    Apparecchio per accompagnare Maria Santissima nella sua gloriosa assunzione...

    Rome, Komarek, 1735.

    Very rare devotional work dedicated to the Assumption of Mary into Heaven, a novena written by Pietro da Vicovaro.

    £550

  10. RIDOLFI, Luca Antonio. 

    Aretefila, dialogo, nel quale da una parte sono quelle ragioni allegate, le quali affermano, lo amore...

    Lyons, Guillaume Rouillé, 1562. 

    The third edition (first 1557) of a remarkable Renaissance philosophical dialogue on the nature of love which marked the culmination of the divisive questione d’amore hotly debated in sixteenth-century literature, our copy extensively annotated by a seventeenth-century collector of musical...

    £2800

  11. 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

  12. JUVENAL, Decimus Junius.

    Argumenta Satyrarum Iuvenalis per Antonimu [sic] Mancinellum. Cu[m] quattuor co[m]me[n]tariis … Sebastianus...

    [(Colophon:) Milan, Giovanni Angelo Scinzenzeler for Giovanni da Legnano, 17 August 1501.]

    Rare edition of Juvenal’s Satires with commentary by the Italian humanists Antonio Mancinelli, Domizio Calderini, Giorgio Merula, and Giorgio Valla, edited by the Greek scholar Sebastianus Ducius, with extensive early annotations and corrections to both the text and commentary.

    £5000

  13. ARISTOTLE.

    Αριστοτελους περι ποιητικης: Aristotelis de poetica liber ex versione Theodori Goulstoni. Lectionis...

    Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1780.

    Large-paper issue of the first Winstanley edition, handsomely bound. The first work published by the Oxford historian and classicist Thomas Winstanley (1749–1823), subsequently Camden Professor of History and Laudian Professor of Arabic, this edition of Aristotle’s De poetica was based...

    £675

  14. CALLINI, Bartolommeo.

    Arrolandosi sotto le insegne di Gesù Cristo col prender l’acqua del santo battesimo nell’insigne cattedrale...

    Vicenza, Tipografia Paroni, 1802.

    A seemingly unrecorded sonnet celebrating the conversion from Judaism to Catholicism of one Marco Mortera of Vicenza, written by his catechist, the Olivetan monk and lecturer in theology Bartolommeo Callini.

    £350

  15. PACE, Giulio.

    Artis Lullianae emendatae libri IV. Quibus docetur methodus, per quam magna terminorum generalium, attributorum,...

    Naples, Secondino Roncagliolo, 1631.

     Rare third edition (first 1618) of this concise summary of Ramon Lull’s (c. 1232–1316) highly influential Ars Magna by the famous Protestant Italian Aristotelian scholar and jurist Giulio Pace (1550–1635), whose edition of the Organon was for a long time the standard edition of Aristotle’s...

    £750

  16. GELLIUS, Aulus.

    Auli Gellii luculentissimi scriptoris Noctes Atticae.

    Lyon, Sebastian Gryphius, 1555.

    Gryphius edition of Aulus Gellius’ famous Attic Nights, issued the year before Gryphius’ death.

    £650

  17. RHOADS, James Evans.

    Autograph letter signed (‘James E. Rhoads’) to Henry Horniman.

    Philadelphia, 22 July 1869.

    A letter from the first president of Bryn Mawr College near Philadelphia. Rhoads (1828–1895) helped establish the college as a nondenominational, internationally respected school, and the first higher education institution to offer graduate degrees to women.

    £100

  18. CASAL, Gaspar do.

    Axiomata christiana ex divinis scripturis & sanctis patribus.

    Coimbra, João da Barreira and João Alvares, 1550.

    First edition of Gaspar do Casal’s major work of theology, which informed his participation in the Council of Trent, from the library of another participant in the Council. 

    £2500

  19. TUCKER, Josiah.

    Betydande frågor om handelen, wid tilfålle af de motsäjelser, som skedde emot den sista billen, om utlänningars...

    [v. Oelreich], 1763.

    First Swedish edition, scarce, of this history on the treatment of foreign residents in Britain, Reflections on the Expediency of a Law for the Naturalization of Foreign Protestants (1751–1752). This book comprises only the main body of Part II (1752), ‘Important Queries occasioned by The Rejection...

    £200

  20. BIBLE.

    Biblia cum concordantiis veteris et novi testamenti et sacrorum canonum: necnon & additionibus in marginibus varietatis...

    [(Colophon:) Lyons, Jean Marion, for Anton II Koberger in Nuremberg, 19 August 1520.]

    A handsomely printed Bible in a contemporary Silesian or Bohemian binding, richly annotated by a Protestant scholar and with numerous woodcuts in contemporary colouring.

    £5500