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  1. SANSON, Nicolas.

    L’Asie en plusieurs cartes nouvelles, et exactes; et en divers traittés de geographie, et d’histoire. Là...

    Paris, for the author, 1658.

    Scarce second edition, featuring seventeen maps of Asia by the great French cartographer Nicolas Sanson, supplemented with his notes on Asiatic geography.

    £2750

  2. LAET, Joannes de, editor.

    De imperio Magni Mogolis sive India vera commentarius e variis auctoribus congestus …

    Leiden, ‘ex officina Elzeviriana’, 1631.

    Pocket-sized Elzevir edition (one of two issued in the same year) of this work on India and the Mughal Empire compiled by the Dutch geographer Joannes de Laet (1581–1649), this copy, exceptionally, in its original drab boards.

    £950

  3. [CHOISY, François Timoléon, Abbé de.]

    Journal ou suite de voyage de Siam. En forme des lettres familieres fait en M.DC.LXXXV...

    Amsterdam, Pierre Mortier, 1687.

    Amsterdam edition, issued the same year as the first Paris edition, recounting a voyage to Siam by the prolific French writer, former cross-dresser, and Jesuit priest, the Abbé de Choisy.

    £300

  4. [DELAMARCHE, Alexandre, cartographer; Bernard COUDERT, lithographer.]

    ‘Atlas’.

    Paris, Legay, [c. 1889].

    An attractive set of large educational jigsaw maps showing the world, Europe, and France, preserved in its original allegorical box.

    £875

  5. CLÜVER, Philipp.

    Introductio in universam geographiam tam veterem, quam novam …

    Wolfenbüttel, Caspar Johann Bismarck for Conrad Buno, 1686.

    The 1686 edition of perhaps the most important geographical textbook of the early modern period, an introduction to global geography by the German antiquarian and geographical pioneer Philipp Clüver, enlarged and supplemented by the German geographer Johann Buno.

    £2500

  6. [BELLIN, Jacques-Nicolas].

    Collection of maps from Prévost’s Histoire générale des voyages.

    Paris, Didot, 1746-1789.

    A collection of seventy-four maps taken from Antoine-François Prévost’s twenty-volume Histoire générale des voyages, the majority of them the work of the French cartographer, geographer and hydrographer Jacques-Nicolas Bellin.

    £2500

  7. REFUGE, Eustace de; Girolamo CANINI, translator.

    Trattato della corte del Signor Refuge. Tradotto di Francese in questo...

    Venice, Giovanni Battista Ciotti, 1621.

    Rare first edition in Italian of this treatise on courtly behaviour attributed to the French statesman Eustache de Refuge (1564–1617), a seventeenth-century bestseller combining Machiavelli with Castiglione, with folding letterpress flowcharts by the translator, Giuseppe Canini, who had also produced...

    £1850

  8. CONDORCET,

    Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de. Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progres de l’espirit humain.

    Paris, Agasse, L’an III [1795].

    First edition of Condorcet’s main work, the summation of the Enlightenment belief in man’s perfectibility, the outline which provided humanity with a view of its own history as a narrative of progress and emancipation.

    £1775

  9. [CERCEAU, Abbé.]

    [Drop-head title:] La constitution vengée des inculpations des ennemis de la Révolution. Discours prononcé...

    [Paris,] Lenoir & Leboucher, [1790].

    One of two editions of this early Revolutionary pamphlet, very rare, defending the draft version of the Constitution of 1791 as consistent with Christianity.

    £185

  10. EYRE, Henry.

    A brief account of the Holt waters, containing one hundred and twelve eminent cures, perform’d by the use of the...

    London, printed for J. Roberts, 1731.

    First edition. The waters from Bath, Bristol and Holt, in Wiltshire, were the most popular English mineral waters of the eighteenth century, in no small part due to the activity of Henry Eyre, ‘Sworn Purveyor to Her Majesty [Queen Caroline, wife of George II] for all Mineral Waters’. Eyre ran a distribution...

    £450

  11. TASSO, Torquato; Giovanni Francesco NEGRI, translator.

    [Drop-head title:] Della tradottione della Gierusalemme liberata...

    [Bologna, 1628.]

    Rare first edition of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata to be translated into dialect, here in facing Bolognese and Italian translation, its printing suspended midway through the thirteenth canto, likely by Cardinal Bernardino Spada, a friend of the translator and the dedicatee of the work.

    £1500

  12. ATWOOD, Margaret.

    The Handmaid’s Tale.

    Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1986.

    First American edition of Atwood’s award-winning theocratic dystopia, preceded only by the Canadian edition.

    £300

  13. [BARSANTI, Pier Vincenzo.]

    Della futura rinnovazione de’ cieli e della terra e de’ suoi abitatori libri tre.

    [Florence,] Stamperia Bonducciana, 1780.

    First edition of this polemical utopia by the Tuscan Dominican Pier Vincenzo Barsanti, which provoked the ire of Jansenists and led to accusations of Molinism and millenarism.

    £675

  14. ECHARD, Laurence.

    A general Ecclesiastical History from the Nativity of our Blessed Saviour to the first Establishment of Christianity...

    London, W. Bowyer for Jacob Tonson, 1702.

    First edition of Echard’s compendious history of the early Church, dedicated to Queen Anne. The work offers a concise and authoritative account compiled from a broad selection of authors, the preface noting: ‘that my Book might want nothing that cou’d be procur’d from others … I have...

    £250

  15. [BOUCHET, Jean.]

    Les triu[m]phes de la noble et amoureuse dame, et l’art de honnestement aymer, compose par le Traverseur des...

    Paris, Estienne Caveiller for Pierre Sergent, 6 June 1539.

    Unrecorded issue of Jean Bouchet’s contemplative vernacular work of moral theology in prose and verse explicitly intended for a female readership, following the personified Soul in dialogue with several virtues as she attempts to combat the forces of earthly temptation with the power of divine grace,...

    £4500

  16. HAREL, Charles.

    Ménage sociétaire ou Moyen d’augmenter son bien-être en diminuant sa dépense, avec indication de quelques...

    Paris, Bureau de la Phalange, à la librairie Sociale, 1839.

    First edition of this work by the entrepreneur and inventor Charles Harel (1771–1852), a friend and disciple of Charles Fourier’s, describing Harel’s project for the founding of an utopian community of two hundred people housed in a single building, bound with eight other works in a sammelband...

    £975

  17. HESSE, Hermann.

    Siddhartha. Eine indische Dichtung.

    Berlin, S. Fischer Verlag, 1922.

    First edition of Hesse’s most celebrated work, the beautiful story of a young Brahmin’s search for the meaning of life on earth at the time of the Gautama Buddha.

    £1200

  18. PAPINI, Roberto.

    Le Arti d’Oggi: Architettura e Arti Decorative in Europa.

    Milan and Rome, Bestetti and Tumminelli, 1930.

    First edition of a thorough and extensively illustrated survey of architectural and artistic styles and artworks from across Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, preceded by the idea of a utopian town, ‘Universa’, where the futuristic ideal for a new society can be achieved and craftsmanship...

    £300

  19. [DANIEL, Yuli Markovich,]

    pseud. ‘Nikolai ARZHAK’. Говорит Москва. Повесть [Govorit Moskva. Povest’....

    Munich, I. Baschkirzew for Washington, D.C., B[oris] Filippoff, 1962.

    First edition, smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published pseudonymously, of this dystopian work in which the government ‘declares a “Day of Public Murders” and permits random murder’ (Terras), one of the books which led directly to Daniel’s arrest and show trial in 1966 for ‘anti-Soviet...

    £150

  20. [IMAGINARY VOYAGE.]

    Admirable Travels of Messieurs Thomas Jenkins and David Lowellin through the unknown Tracts of Africa: with...

    London, ‘for the Benefit of Robert Barker, an unfortunate blind man’, 1785.

    Rare, a lively chapbook novella of adventures and tribulations in Africa, fusing elements of a Robinsonade with a brief utopia.

    £1500