Gift Ideas
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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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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
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WHITMAN, Walt, and Antonio FRASCONI (illustrator).
A Whitman Portrait.
[New York, Spiral Press, 1960.]
First edition, comprising extracts from Leaves of Grass, facsimile letters and a selection of woodcut ‘portraits’ by Frasconi. Numbered 149 of 525 copies signed by Frasconi, printed on Japanese Goyu paper.
£250
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SOLDANI, Jacopo.
Lezione di Jacopo Soldani sopra il Brindisi recitata da lui nell’Accademia Fiorentina il dì 20 di gennaio...
Florence, Tipografia della pia casa di Patronato, 1886.
First and only edition of satirist Jacopo Soldani’s 1597 debut address to the Accademia Fiorentina on the art of making a toast.
£75
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TENNYSON, Alfred Tennyson, Lord.
In Memoriam.
London: Edward Moxon … 1850.
First edition, first issue, with the misprints on page 2 (‘the sullen tree’ for ‘thee sullen tree’) and page 198 (‘baseness’ for ‘bareness’).
£950
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KELLER, Martialis.
Neueröffnete Himmels-Schule, in welcher aus zwölf, als so vielen Theilen vorgesetzten Lehrpunkten verschiedene...
Augsburg, Matthäus Riegers, 1793.
Rare later edition of this educational and devotional work by the Bavarian Benedictine Martialis Keller, containing prayers, exercises, and points of doctrine, and illustrated with attractive engravings, this copy in a contemporary local binding.
£500
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LAING, Alexander.
The True Hero and Other Poems …
Glasgow, Morison Brothers, 1893.
First edition, scarce, a presentation copy, inscribed in a shaky hand ‘To Wm J. Robertson / with author’s regards / Alex Laing / 8-4-19’.
£375
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BEISNER, Monika.
Dante Alighieri: La Commedia in 100 tavole.
Turin, Attini, 2021.
Limited edition, one of 500 numbered sets, of Monika Beisner’s one hundred illustrations of the Divine Comedy, each accompanying one canto, conveying with remarkable fidelity the vivacity of Dante’s verse.
£60
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[THE BOOK COLLECTOR.]
A special Number to commemorate the 150th Anniversary of Bernard Quaritch Ltd.
The Book Collector, 1997.
A collection of essays together recounting the history of Bernard Quaritch Ltd, published by The Book Collector to commemorate the firm’s sesquicentenary in 1997.
£25
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ANDREWS, Mark E.
The Science and Engineering of Water: An illustrated catalogue of books and manuscripts on Italian hydraulics,...
Toronto, A.E. Publications, 2022.
A lavishly illustrated catalogue, tracing the development of science and engineering through the early modern period. Some 367 printed books, manuscripts, and maps are presented in chronological order, highlighting the relationship between the evolution of ideas and the authors who documented...
£85
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MYERS, Robin, Michael HARRIS, and Giles MANDELBROTE (eds).
Lives in Book History: Changing Contours of Research over...
Leicester, Garendon Press, 2022.
‘This volume has grown out of one event in a long series of annual conferences on book-trade history – held to mark the fortieth conference in 2018. For this we had asked nine well-known book historians to give a retrospective review of their field, be it manuscripts, incunabula, book binding, and...
£35
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QUARITCH, Bernard Alexander Christian, editor.
Contributions towards a Dictionary of English Book-Collectors as also of...
London, Bernard Quaritch Ltd, 1969.
A facsimile reprint of Quaritch’s series of profiles of bibliophiles, with brief lists of the treasures of their collections and notes on their dispersal at auction or in the trade, which remains a useful resource both for the history of book-collecting in Britain and for provenance research. Contributions...
£25
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[COVENTRY, Francis].
La Vie et les aventures du petit Pompée. Histoire critique traduite de l’anglois par M. Toussaint …
A Londres [i.e. Paris?]. 1752.
First edition? in French of Coventry’s most famous work, The History of Pompey the Little, or, The Life and Adventures of a Lap-Dog (1751), a lively satire of fashionable London life, told through the eyes of a favoured pet.
£500
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[KINGDOM OF THE TWO SICILIES.]
Ruoli de’ generali ed uffiziali attivi e sedentanei del reale esercito e dell’armata di mare...
Napoli, Reale Tipografia Militare, 1855.
Scarce 1855 edition of this roster of army and navy officers, doctors, chaplains, and administrators in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, issued during the reign of Ferdinand II and only a few years before the kingdom’s demise, handsomely bound with the royal arms on each board.
£400
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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
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SWIFT, Jonathan.
A Tale of a Tub … to which is added, an Account of a Battle between the antient and modern Books in St. James’s...
London, C. Bathurst, 1751.
A scarce later edition of Swift’s classic satires on corruption in religion and learning, as exemplified in the conduct of Peter (Roman Catholicism), Martin (Luther), and Jack (Calvin) in the Tale of the Tub, and the spirited fight over the highest peak of Parnassus in the Battel of...
£175
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STEPNIAK, Sergey.
דאָס אינטערערדישע רוסלאַנד … איבערזעצט פון א. פרומקין
[Dos...New York, Maks N. Maisel, 1921.
Scarce first American edition in Yiddish of Stepniak’s first and most influential book. Written in Italian during exile in Switzerland following his assassination of Nikolai Mezentsov, chief of Alexander II’s secret police, Underground Russia was published in 1882 and translated into...
£150