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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.

 
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  1. APULEIUS (Julien FLEURY, editor).

    Lucii Apuleii Madaurensis Platonici philosophi opera interpretatione et notis illustravit...

    Paris, Frederic Leonard, 1688.

    First Delphin edition of the works of Apuleius, ‘une des meillures éditions qui soient dans la collection des Ad usum’ according to Brunet, comprising the Metamorphoses, his popularisations of Platonic philosophy, and excerpts from his lectures known as the Florida. The Delphin classics were a landmark...

    £350

  2. APULEIUS, Lucius. 

    L. Apuleii Metamorphoseos, sive lusus Asini libri XI.  Floridoru[m] IIII.  De deo Socratis I.  De philosophia...

    Venice, ‘in aedibus Aldi et Andreae Soceri’, May 1521. 

    First Aldine edition of the works of the second-century AD Numidian novelist Apuleius, with the editio princeps of Alcinous’s second-century handbook on Plato’s philosophy in the original Greek, from the library of the great French writer Victor Hugo. 

    £2000

  3. ARISTIDES, Aelius. 

    Orationum tomi tres, nunc primum latine versi a Gulielmo Cantero Ultraiectino.  Huc accessit orationum tomus...

    Basel, Peter Perna and Heinrich Petrus, 1566. 

    First edition in Latin, a remarkable copy once owned by one of the preeminent music theorists and composers of Renaissance Italy, Gioseffo Zarlino.  The translation was prepared from the Greek by the German scholar Wilhelm Canter (1542–1575), author of an acclaimed Syntagma, a systematic...

    £2750

  4. ARISTOPHANES.

    Aristophanis comicorum principis Comoediae undecim, e graeco in latinum ad verbu[m] translatae Andreae Divo Iustinopolitano...

    Venice, 1542 [colophon: apud D. Jacob a Burgofrancho papiensem, 1538].

    First collected Latin edition of Aristophanes, translated from the Greek by Andrea Divo.

    £1200

  5. Aristotle: From Antiquity to the Modern Era.

    Preface by Martin J. Gross. Essays by Benjamin Morison and Barbara Scalvini.

    Lewes, D. Giles Ltd for the Martin J. Gross Family Foundation, 2021.

    Aristotle’s influence towers over western philosophy and science. His astonishing range and depth – philosophy and logic, the physical and natural sciences, ethics and politics – make him indisputably the most important intellectual figure in the western tradition before the modern age.

    £30

  6. CAESAR, Gaius Julius.

    Commentarii … tradotti di latino in volgar lingua per Agostino Ortica della Porta Genovese, nuovamente...

    Venice, Heirs of Aldus, 1547.

    Best edition in Italian of Caesar’s Commentaries, a copy with attractive Scottish provenance.

    £2250

  7. [CAESAR.]  RAMUS, Petrus (Pierre de la RAMÉE). 

    Liber de militia C. Julii Caesaris, cum praefatione Joannis Thomae Freigii. 

    Frankfurt, heirs of Andreas Wechel, 1584. 

    An attractively bound copy of Ramus’s uncommon treatise on Caesar’s military tactics, with unusual edge decoration.  The humanist Petrus Ramus (1515–1572) published widely on classical history and grammar while teaching at the Collège de France.  He was briefly forced from his post after...

    £450

  8. CARTARI, Vincenzo. 

    Le imagini con la spositione de i dei de gli antichi. 

    Venice, per Francesco Marcolini, 1556. 

    First edition of Cartari’s influential and successful treatise on the mythology of the ancients. Cartari concentrated on the iconography of the gods, explaining their guises and detailing their several attributes. His book was expressively written to aid artists, painters, and sculptors to...

    £800

  9. [CICERO, Marcus Tullius.] 

    Tully’s three Books of Offices, in English.  With Notes explaining the Method and Meaning of the...

    London, [W. Onley] for Sam. Buckley, 1699. 

    First edition of this translation by Thomas Cockman, who had prepared an edition of the original text in 1695, here provides copious footnotes and an index.  There were at least eleven further editions by the end of the eighteenth century. 

    £300

  10. [CICERO, Marcus Tullius.]

    Commentarii Philippicarum Marci Ciceronis cum annotationibus Georgii Trapezuntii Philippi Beroaldi et...

    Paris, Thomas Caseus for Jean Petit, [1514].

    Rare edition, attractively printed and with occasional contemporary annotations, of Cicero’s Philippics, comprising Cicero’s text along with the commentaries of the Cretan humanist George of Trebizond (1396–1486), the Bolognese rhetorician Filippo Beroaldo (1453–1505), and the Perugia...

    £950

  11. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA (Titus Flavius CLEMENS). 

    Omnia opera. 

    Paris, Sebastien Nivelle, 1572. 

    A thoroughly annotated copy of this early edition of the complete works of Clement of Alexandria, in the Latin translation of Gentian Hervet.  Clement lived and wrote in the second and third centuries, one of the most important interpreters of Christianity within an established Greek philosophical...

    £4750

  12. CONTI, Natale. 

    Mythologiæ, sive explicationis fabularum, libri decem.  In quibus omnia propè naturalis & moralis philosophiæ...

    Frankfurt, the heirs of André Wechel, 1584. 

    The Mythologiae of Natale Conti (Natalis Comes), first published Venice 1567, was a standard reference work for classical mythology in the later Renaissance, treating the corpus as allegories that syncretized ancient philosophy and could thus be decoded by the initiated reader. 

    £950

  13. CURTIUS Rufus, Quintus. 

    De rebus Alexandri Magni, cum commentario perpetuo & indice absolutissimo Samuelis Pitisci, quibus accedunt...

    Utrecht, Franciscus Halma, 1685. 

    First Halma edition of Curtius’s history of Alexander the Great, with a series of accomplished etched illustrations by Jan van den Aveelen. 

    £375

  14. DASSIER, Jean and Jacques-Antoine. 

    ‘An Explanation of Dassier’s Medals being a Representation of a Series of Events taken...

    London, c. 1795–1800. 

    An exceptionally fine illustrated manuscript, with drawings after the series of sixty medals of Roman history from Romulus to the Age of Augustus produced by Jean Dassier and his son in 1740-1743.  The drawings are executed with considerable finesse, adding detailed elements not clearly visible...

    £6500

  15. DIODORUS Siculus.

    Bibliothecae historicae libri XV. Hoc est, quotquot Graece extant de quadraginta quorum quinque nunc primum Latine...

    Basel, Heinrich Petri, August 1559.

    Important edition, the first to be overseen by Sébastien Castellion, of Diodorus’s influential ‘Historical library’.

    £2500

  16. DIOGENES LAERTIUS, [and Henri ESTIENNE (editor)].

    Περι βίων, δογμάτων και αποφθεγμων...

    [Geneva,] Henri Estienne, 1570.

    First Estienne edition of The Lives of the Philosophers, a very important edition in the original Greek, ‘in which appear for the first time many passages discovered in manuscripts by Estienne’. ‘The volume also contains thirty-six pages of important textual annotations by Henri Estienne,...

    £1400

  17. [DOVES PRESS.] 

    Pervigilium Veneris. 

    Hammersmith, ‘printed by T.J. Cobden-Sanderson at the Doves Press,’ 1910. 

    One of 150 copies on paper of the elusive Pervigilium Veneris, in the original Doves Bindery vellum, ‘a triumph of simplicity and restraint’ (Tidcombe). 

    £950

  18. EPICTETUS.

    To tou Epiktetou encheiridion. Ex editione Joannis Upton accurate expressum.

    Glasgow, Foulis, 1751.

    The first miniature Foulis edition of Epictetus in Greek, and the first Foulis Epictetus in Greek only; it had been preceded by a larger format, duodecimo (1748) edition in Greek and Latin. A 1765 reissue was, according to ESTC, reset.

    £900

  19. EPIPHANIUS.

    Κατα αιρεσεων ογδοηκοτα το επικληθεν Παναριον … Contra octoginta haereses...

    Basel, [Johann Herwagen, 1544].

    Editio princeps of the Greek text of Epiphanius’s great compendium of heresies, in a particularly attractive and well-preserved contemporary pigskin binding.

    £5000

  20. FERRER, Ventura Pascual.

    Historia de los Dictadores de la republica Romana …

    Cartagena de Indias, Government Press for Gonzalez Pujòl, 1814.

    First edition, very rare, of this Colombia-printed history of the Roman dictators by the Cuban lawyer and writer Ferrer y Feruz (1772–1851), written in Colombia during the civil strife of early independence.

    £650