Gift Ideas

  1. [CUMBERLAND, Richard.]

    Arundel. By the author of the Observer.

    London, Printed for C. Dilly … 1789.

    First edition. Richard Cumberland (1732–1811) was the grandson of the great scholar Richard Bentley, and great-grandson of the Bishop of Peterborough; he had already made his name as a playwright in London, and was also the author of a periodical paper the Observer when he published this,...

    £1500

  2. GALIER, W.H.

    A visit to Blestland.

    London, George Robertson & Co., 1896.

    First edition of this novel of utopian socialism which lambasts capitalism and religion. Blestland is a republican workers’ paradise located on a different planet which reveals how the divisions of earth can be abolished: by limiting ‘the enormous power for evil which capital can wield’....

    £280

  3. HORACE; James TATE, editor

    Horatius restitutus: or the books of Horace arranged in chronological order according...

    Cambridge, J. Smith for J. & J.J. Deighton, 1832. 

    First edition of this attempt to arrange the books of Horace in chronological order by the classical scholar and master of Richmond School, James Tate (1771–1843), this copy presented by him to Thomas Gaisford (1779–1855), classicist, Dean of Christ Church Oxford, Regius Professor of Greek,...

    £150

  4. ANACREON.

    [Odaria.] Ανακρεοντος τηιου μελη praefixo commentario quo poëtae genus traditur et bibliotheca Anacreonteia...

    Parma, [Bodoni] ‘in aedibus Palatinis’, 1791.

    Thick paper copy, apparently one of 12 copies from an edition of 212. This attractive edition of Anacreon’s Odaria was edited by G. C. Amaduzzi and printed by Bodoni. ‘The editions of 1785 and 1791 are printed in capital letters, and more elegant and exquisitely finished productions...

    £650

  5. 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

  6. SCHILLER, Friedrich.

    Wallenstein ein dramatisches Gedicht …

    Tübingen, J. G. Cotta, 1800.

    First edition of Schiller’s dramatic Wallenstein trilogy, tracing the rise and fall of the Bohemian general Albrecht von Wallenstein during the Thirty Years’ War, from the von Carlowitz library and perhaps associated with the play’s French translator, Baroness Aloïse-Christine de Carlowitz....

    £800

  7. [JUVENILE.]

    [Library for Youth, or Book-Case of Knowledge, 10 vols.]

    London: Printed for John Wallis … by T. Gillet or J. Cundee … 1800.

    A fine complete set of Wallis’s ‘Library for Youth’ also known as the ‘Book-Case of Knowledge’, with all ten volumes in the first editions, dated 1800, and with two original designs (in reverse) for the frontispieces.

    £4750

  8. [ALTAR CARDS.]

    Two altar cards with Latin text and images of Christ and St John.

    ‘A Paris, chez I. Baudemont’, second half of seventeenth century.

    Two seemingly unrecorded hand-coloured prompt cards for priests, bearing readings and prayers, and devotional images of Jesus and St John, comprising separately printed images, text and borders arranged together in collage fashion.

    £2750

  9. GELLIUS, Aulus; [Johann Friedrich GRONOVIUS, editor].

    Noctes atticae: editio nova et prioribus omnibus docti hominis cura...

    Amsterdam, Jan Jansson, 1651.

    Jansson’s piracy of Gronovius’s celebrated version, published the same year as the first edition. A commonplace book compiled by Aulus Gellius in the second century, the Attic Nights received several editions, of which the most highly regarded is that of Johann Friedrich Gronovius (Gronow,...

    £450

  10. [ENGELBRECHT, Martin.]

    [Vier Jahreszeiten. Serie 89.]

    [Augsburg, Martin Engelbrecht, c. 1750.]

    An attractive hand-coloured engraved peepshow showing the four seasons, with summer in the foreground retreating into winter behind, lined with printed waste from an illustrated Dutch religious broadside.

    £1750

  11. DENNYS, Nicholas Belfield, editor.

    The Treaty Ports of China and Japan. A complete guide to the open ports of those countries,...

    Shortrede and Co., 1867.

    First edition, complete with all twenty-nine maps and plans, of this remarkable guide to the open ports of China and Japan in the late 1860s, aimed at ‘travellers, merchants, and residents’, compiled by Nicholas Dennys (1839–1900), a noted scholar of Chinese folklore, with the sinologist...

    £4750

  12. DIO CASSIUS.

    Dione historico delle guerre et fatti de Romani. Tradotto di Greco in lingua vulgare per M. Nicolo Leoniceno. Con...

    Venice, Niccolò Zoppino, March 1533.

    First edition of Dio Cassius’s Roman History in any language, translated into Italian from the original Greek by Niccolò Leoniceno and preceding the Greek editio princeps, printed by Robert Estienne in 1548, by some fifteen years.

    £2500

  13. [POEMS ON DRINKING.]

    Raccolta di brindisi per tutte le occasioni; apostrofi al vino; inni in lode di Bacco, canzoni da tavola;...

    Milan, Emilio Croci, 1875.

    First edition of this compact font of inspiration for all partygoers, containing odes to Bacchus, endless praise of the merits of wine, drinking songs, and toasts for every occasion, including a party of printers.

    £200

  14. LOCKE, John. 

    [An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding].  Extrait d’un Livre Anglois qui n’est pas encore publié, intitulé...

    Amsterdam, Wolfgang, Waesbergi, Boom, & Van Someren, 1688. 

    A substantial and extremely influential extract, published two years before the appearance of the book, of Locke’s Essay concerning human understanding: a publication of major consequence in the history of philosophy.  This issue of the Bibliothèque universelle et historique also...

    £2850

  15. GISSING, George.

    The Unclassed, A Novel … in three Volumes.

    London, Chapman and Hall, 1884.

    First edition of Gissing’s second novel – and Bernard Shaw’s favourite of his novels – in the single-volume remaindered issue in red cloth.

    £950

  16. [SURTEES, Robert Smith,] and John LEECH (illustrator).

    Handley Cross series.

    London, Bradbury, Agnew, & Co., 1899-1900.

    Limited ‘Master of Foxhounds’ edition, finely printed at the Whitefriars Press. Having published the first editions of several of Surtees’s sporting novels, Bradbury, Agnew, & Co. gathered and reprinted the six most successful as the ‘Handley Cross series’ as luxury sets. Publisher’s...

    £1200

  17. KOH, John.

    Dogs in Early Photography.

    London, Bernard Quaritch Ltd, 2024.

    Throughout history, dogs have been a subject in art; dogs were featured in cave drawings, coins, funerary sculptures or medieval marginalia. Before smartphones allowed dog owners to capture and share every moment of their dogs’ lives, fine art documented this relationship and promoted the dog from...

    £50

  18. JUVENAL, Decimus Junius, and Aulus Persius FLACCUS.

    Satyrae.

    London, J. Brindley, 1744.

    First Brindley edition, edited by the Irish classical scholar Usher Gahagan (d. 1749). John Brindley began to publish his series of well-printed duodecimo classics in 1744, for which Gahagan edited eleven works before his arrest and conviction for high treason, having become embroiled with a...

    £650

  19. [RENNEVILLE, Sophie de (?).]

    Contes a Aglaé, ou la jeune moraliste.

    Paris, Caillou, c.1820.

    Very uncommon edition, possibly the first, of this collection of educational contes moraux, sometimes attributed to the prolific children’s author and journalist Sophie de Renneville (1772–1822).

    £325

  20. YARRELL, William.

    A History of British Fishes … illustrated by nearly 400 Woodcuts.

    London, Samuel Bentley for John van Voorst, 1836.

    First collected editions, with an autograph letter on the Hebridal smelt from the species’ discoverer. Published serially from 1835 to 1836, Yarrell’s History of British Fishes was reprinted within a year, and followed soon after by Thomas Bell’s British Reptiles in 1839 and...

    £750