Gift Ideas
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MONTGOMMERY, Louis de, Seigneur de Corbouson.
La Milice Francoise, reduite a l’ancien ordre et discipline militaire...
Paris, François Rousselet, 1610.
Scarce second edition of this influential work on military logistics, with copper-engraved illustrations of cannons, grenades, and various military formations.
£650
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[SACROBOSCO, Johannes de.]
CLAVIUS, Christophorus. In sphaeram Ioannis de Sacro Bosco commentarius, nunc iterum ab ipso Auctore...
Rome, Francesco Zanetti for Domenico Basa, 1581.
Third edition, the first to contain Clavius’s condemnation of Copernicus, with ten highly detailed woodcut diagrams of solar and lunar eclipses not included in the first edition.
£2500
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MORRISON, Robert.
A grammar of the Chinese language … by the Rev. Robert Morrison.
Serampore, printed at the Mission-Press, 1815.
First edition, rare on the market, of this pioneering Chinese grammar by the missionary and eminent scholar of Chinese, Robert Morrison (1782–1834), described here in his preface as ‘the first work of the kind in English’.
£3750
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[GELENIUS, Sigismund (editor).]
Notitia utraque, dignitatum, cum orientis, tum occidentis, ultra arcadii honoriique tempora,...
Lyons, [Jacques du Creux for] Jean de Gabiano, 1608.
An expanded edition, illustrated on almost every leaf, of an anonymous fifth-century description of the Roman Empire.
£875
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DREVES, [Johann Friedrich Peter,] and [Friedrich Gottlob] HAYNE [and Johann Stephan CAPIEUX (engraver)].
Choix...
Leipzig, Voss et compagnie, 1802.
First edition in French, the Plesch set, with 125 handsomely hand-coloured botanical plates, adapted from the German edition finished the previous year. Issued under the title Botanisches Bilderbuch für die Jugend und Freunde der Pflanzenkunde, the work had first appeared in twenty-eight...
£2750
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CAESAR, Gaius Julius.
[Opera] quae extant.
London, J. Brindley, 1744.
An attractive set of Brindley’s duodecimo Caesar, edited by the Irish classicist Usher Gahagan. The Caesar is one of several small-format classics published by Brindley in 1744, for which Gahagan was employed as editor. He subsequently produced versions of Quintus Curtius and Catullus, Propertius,...
£400
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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’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.
£2750
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FLORUS.
Lucii Flori rerum ab urbe condita liber primus [– quartus].
[Venice, in aedibus Aldi et Andreae Soceri, March 1521.]
Florus’s epitome of Roman history, extracted from the Aldine edition of March 1521 which comprised an epitome of Livy, Florus, and Niccolò Perotti’s translation of Polybius.
£750
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GELLIUS, Aulus [and Johann Friedrich GRONOVIUS (editor)].
Noctes atticae: editio nova et prioribus omnibus docti...
Amsterdam, Jan Jansson, 1651.
Jansson’s piracy of Gronovius’s 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 (1611–1671),...
£450
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HORACE.
Opera omnia.
Paris, [Didot fils for] A. Mesnier, 1828.
A scarce miniature edition of Horace’s works, printed by Didot fils with type cut by Henri Didot.
£400
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TACITUS, C. Cornelius; Justus LIPSIUS and Hugo GROTIUS (editors).
[Opera] C. Corn. Tacitus ex I. Lipsii editione...
Leiden, Elzevir, 1640.
First edition with Grotius’s notes, elegantly bound in early nineteenth-century English morocco. Elzevir had published an edition of Lipsius’s Tacitus in 1634; Dibdin notes ‘Of these elegant little editions [of 1634 and 1640], that of 1640 is preferred, on account of its having the notes...
£500
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STATIUS, Publius Papinius.
Pub. Papinus [sic] Statius, denuo ac serio emendatus.
Amsterdam, Jan Jansson, 1630.
First and only Jansson edition of the works of the first-century Roman poet Statius. The volume opens with the Silvae, a collection of poems in five books addressed to patrons including the emperor Domitian, containing Statius’s famous lines on the death of a friend’s parrot. His...
£275
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TACITUS.
C. Cornelius Tacitus, cum optimis exemplaribus collatus.
Amsterdam, Daniel Elzevir, 1678.
A remarkably fresh set of the third and final Elzevir edition of this format, reprinted from the edition of 1665.
£275
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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
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HORACE; James TATE (editor).
Horatius restitutus: or the books of Horace arranged in chronological order according...
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
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VIRGIL Maro, Publius, and Giovanni Andrea dell’ANGUILLARA (trans.).
Il primo libro della Eneida di Vergilio,...
Padua, Gratioso Perchacino, 1564.
First edition of the first book of Anguillara’s verse translation of the Aeneid, a copy printed on strong paper and inscribed by the author. The humanist, poet, and successful translator of Ovid Giovanni Andrea dell’Anguillara (1517–1572) undertook to translate into Italian ottava...
£2500
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PLINY the Younger.
Epistolarum libri X & panegyricus.
Leiden, [Bonaventure & Abraham] Elzevir, 1640.
First Elzevir edition, handsomely bound for the Irish politician Thomas Wogan Browne.
£450
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HUGHES, Langston.
Shakespeare in Harlem.
New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1942.
First edition of this wartime collection of poems, inscribed shortly after Hughes and Bridson met for the first time: ‘For Geoffrey Bridson, with the friendship, and regards of Langston Hughes. New York, January 28, 1944’.
£1000
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[BOLINGBROKE, Henry St John, Viscount].
Letters, on the Spirit of Patriotism: on the Idea of a Patriot King: and on the State of...
London: Printed for A. Millar … 1749.
First authorised edition. Written in 1738 for the Prince of Wales, the manuscript was then entrusted to Pope who had it printed, to Bolingbroke’s fury: he bought up the entire edition and had it burnt in October 1744 (only two imperfect copies survive, at the British Library and Princeton). He later...
£375