Search results

  1. [GOETHE.] 

    REICHARDT, Johann Friedrich.  Goethe’s Lieder, Oden, Balladen und Romanzen mit Musik von J.F. Reichardt.  Erste...

    Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel, [1809–11]. 

    Very rare first complete edition of Reichardt’s musical settings of Goethe’s poetry, comprising 128 settings of which thirty-nine appear here for the first time. 

    £6500

  2. SA‘DI, Abu ‘Abd Allah Musharrif al-Din (Adam OLEARIUS, translator). 

    Persianischer Rosenthal.  In welchen viel lustige...

    Schleswig, Johann Holwein for Johann Nauman in Hamburg, 1654. 

    Rare first illustrated edition, and the first edition translated by Olearius, of Sa‘di’s Gulistān or ‘Rose-garden’, with splendid engravings. 

    £6500

  3. GIZZI [or GITTIO], Andrea Giuseppe.

    Lo scettro del despota, overo del titolo, e dignità dispotale, discorso istorico,...

    Naples, G. Raillard, 1697.

    Only edition of this extraordinary and rare study of legal, ceremonial, and political roles of the despot, or despotes, a class of prince akin to a king and beneath an emperor in the power structures of both the Byzantine world and Renaissance Italy, and thus a title used both in Venice and...

    £2500

  4. GELLIUS, Aulus. 

    Noctium Atticarum commentaria per Bonfinem Asculanum summa nuper diligentia et studio recognita. 

    Venice, Giovanni Tacuino, 1517. 

    Second edition of Gellius’s opus with the commentary of philologist Matteo Bonfini (1441–1517), annotated throughout by a contemporary reader whose corrections and comments include references to the lectures of Paolo Bombasi as cited by Erasmus in the 1508 edition of the Adagia

    £5500

  5. GREENE, Graham. 

    A burnt-out Case. 

    London, Heinemann, [1961]. 

    Uncorrected proof copy of the first edition in English.  This was evidently used as a review copy, with the upper cover annotated in pencil ‘700 words by Nov 28’.  The unknown reviewer has made several notes in pencil on the half-title: ‘Criticism – c[oul]d come from the soc[ial] realist...

    £275

  6. DICKENS, Charles. 

    The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club … with forty-three illustrations, by R. Seymour and Phiz. 

    London, Chapman & Hall, 1837. 

    First edition, first issue.  The Pickwick Papers was serialised in twenty parts from April 1836, the novel reaching its conclusion in November 1837, when it was also released as a three-decker.  It was both Dickens’s most popular work and the launch of his relationship with Hablot K. Browne...

    £2000

  7. SBRUGLIO, Riccardo. 

    Richardi Sbrulii equitis Foroiuliani Cesareiq[ue] poete ad magnificu[m] atq[ue] illustrem Maximilianu[m]...

    [Colophon:] Augsburg, Hans von Erfurt, 1519.

    First, very rare, edition, of Sbruglio’s Latin poems addressed to Maximilianus Transylvanus, published in the year that Charles V became Holy Roman Emperor.  A native of Cividale in northern Italy, Sbruglio (c. 1480 – after 1525) studied and taught at Wittenberg (where the rector compared...

    £1800

  8. JUSTINUS, Marcus Junianius, and Lucius FLORUS. 

    [Epitome historiarum:] Justini historici clarissimi in Trogi Pompei historias...

    [Venice, Bartolomeo Zani, 3 February 1503]. 

    A thoroughly annotated copy of a greatly influential compendium of Trogus’s monumental forty-four-book Historia of the world from Babylon to the Augustan era. 

    £3800

  9. [SCHLOSSER, Johann Albert].  BODDAERT, Pieter.

    Epistola ad … Hier. Dav. Gaubium … De chaetodonte diacantho, descripto atque...

    Amsterdam, apud M. Magerum, 1772.

    First and only edition of Boddaert’s description of the Royal Angelfish found in the Schlosser natural history cabinet.  This is the first monograph on the Royal Angelfish (and its first illustration), a now common species of coral fish in the Pacific and Indian Ocean. 

    £500

  10. [BLASPHEMY.] 

    Handlu[n]g eynes Ersamen weysen Rats zu Nürmberg, von dem grossen laster der Gotsschwür und zutrinckens, verpotten. 

    [Altenburg, Gabriel Kantz,] 1526.

    First edition, very rare, of a short pamphlet against blasphemy and drunkenness printed at a small press in Germany at the beginning of the Reformation.

    £1500

  11. NICOLAUS of Damascus, and Niels KRAG (editor). 

    Ex Nicolai Damasceni universali historia seu de moribus gentium...

    [Geneva or Heidelberg,] Pierre de Saint-André, 1593. 

    First edition of Krag’s translation of Nicolaus of Damascus’s observations on the customs of the peoples of the ancient world.  The observations on forty ancient peoples (among them the Iberians, Celts, Phrygians, Assyrians, and Ethiopians) are extracted from the Universal History...

    £300

  12. JAYADEVA, and Friedrich MAJER (translator).

    Gita-Govinda, ein Indisches Singspiel ... aus der Ursprache ins Englische...

    Weimar, Landes-Industrie-Comptoir, 1802.

    First and only separate edition of this uncommon German translation of Gita Govinda, a ‘devoutly erotic poem of the twelfth-century Bengali poet Jayadeva’ (ODNB).

    £475

  13. [JACOBUS DE GRUYTRODE, (attr.)]. 

    Lavacrum conscientie [omnium sacerdotum]. 

    [Colophon:] Cologne, Heinrich Quentell, 1504.

    Rare edition of this popular late medieval treatise widely ascribed to the Carthusian monk Jacobus de Gruytrode (c. 1400–1475). 

    £750

  14. [TURKS.]

    Ein Gebet wider die vorstehende Noth und Gefahr der Christenheit, wegen deß Türcken. 

    [Wittenberg?], Im Jahr 1593. 

    A 1593 pamphlet containing a German prayer against the Turks.  Throughout the sixteenth century the Ottoman empire remained a powerful existential threat to western European Christendom.  Following a comparatively lengthy period of peace, renewed skirmishes and border conflicts resurfaced in...

    £875

  15. BARBARO, Francesco. 

    De re uxoria libri duo, ut venustate sermonis praeclari, ita & praeceptis optimis & exemplis uberrimis ex...

    Amsterdam, Jan Jansson, 1639. 

    An attractive later edition of this famous treatise on marriage by the eminent Venetian humanist and politician Francesco Barbaro (1390–1454). 

    £275

  16. ISIDORUS A CRUCE. 

    Devoti admodum et consolatione pleni confessionales Psalmi septem in quibus peccator divinam pro criminibus...

    Dillingen, Johann Caspar Bencard, 1675. 

    Rare illustrated edition of this work devoted to confession and seeking forgiveness for sins by Isidorus a Cruce (d. 1681), abbot of St Charles the Great in Prague. 

    £450

  17. PARABOSCO, Girolamo. 

    Libro primo [- quarto] delle lettere amorose di M. Girolamo Parabosco.  Con alcune altre di nuovo aggiunte. 

    Venice, Domenico Farri, 1581.

    Uncommon collected edition of Girolamo Parabosco’s (1524–1557) immensely popular letters to anonymous lovers, literary contemporaries, and a courtesan, with several letters written from a female point of view, this copy formerly in the possession of Tycho Brahe’s nephew and with several manuscript...

    £900

  18. BRUNFELS, Otto. 

    Precationes Biblicae sanctoru[m] patrum, illustrium viroru[m] et mulierum utriusq[ue] Testamenti. 

    Strasbourg, Johannes Schott, 1528.

    First edition, rare.  The earliest Protestant prayer-books, of which this is perhaps the most notable example, often comprised prayers taken directly from (or adapted from) the Bible.  Brunfels’s Precationes Biblicae appeared in the same year in German translation (Biblisch Bettbüchlein...

    £3500

  19. [PRAYERS.] 

    Récueil de plusieurs prieres.   

    Vienna, ‘chez Georg Müllner libraire et relieur des livres’, [c. 1810].

    Very rare and charming early nineteenth-century prayer book in an attractive binding by the Viennese ‘libraire et relieur’ Georg Müllner. 

    £450

  20. BAIKIE, William Balfour.

    Narrative of an exploring voyage up the rivers Kwóra and Bínue (commonly known as the Niger and Tsádda)...

    London, John Murray, 1856.

    First edition recounting an expedition along previously uncharted waters of the Niger under the captaincy of the maritime naturalist and surgeon William Balfour Baikie. ‘The influence of Sir Roderick Murchison procured [Baikie] the post of surgeon and naturalist to the Niger expedition of 1854, and...

    £175