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  1. DUFF, Alan Colquhoun.

    ‘J. D. Duff of Trinity 1860–1940 by Major-General A. C. Duff, C.B., O.B.E., M.C.’

    July 1970.

    Unpublished biography of the Scottish classical scholar and Cambridge Apostle James Duff Duff (1860–1940) written by his eldest son.

    £225

  2. ERNST, Max.

    Une semaine de bonté ou les sept éléments capitaux. Roman. Premier [– Dernier] cahier …

    Paris, Éditions Jeanne Bucher, 1934.

    First edition, no. 706 of 800 copies on papier Navarre from a total edition of 816, of the most famous of Max Ernst’s Surrealist ‘collage novels’, composed entirely of recomposed images drawn from illustrations to nineteenth-century novels, encyclopaedias, scientific journals, and engravings...

    £4500

  3. GOLDONI, Carlo.

    Scelta di alcune commedie. Per uso de’ dilettanti della lingua italiana. Prima edizione italiana.

    Livorno, Assunto Barbani, 1816.

    First edition printed in Italy of a collection of ten comedies by Goldoni, selected for their lack of complicated syntax and lack of Venetian dialect and idioms, published in Livorno for the benefit of the English community.

    £175

  4. GONZAGA, Curzio.

    Il Fido amante, poema eroico.

    Mantua, [(colophon:) Giacomo Ruffinello, 1582].

    First edition of an Italian Renaissance heroic poem in thirty-six cantos, much appreciated by Tasso and published the year after the first authorized edition of the Gerusalemme liberata.

    £600

  5. [HAMBURG.] 

    A sammelband of material relating to the Great Fire of Hamburg. 

    [Germany, 1842.] 

    A fine and unusual volume of materials relating to the Great Fire of Hamburg of May 1842, comprising a long article by Joseph Mendelssohn published over five issues of Der Komet, special issues of several periodicals devoted to the disaster, a rare poem by Margarethe Hedwig Hülle, and...

    £850

  6. HAMILTON, ‘Eliza’ [Elizabeth].

    Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah; written previous to, and during the Period of...

    London, J. Crowder for G. & J. Robinson, 1801.

    Second edition of Hamilton’s first separately published work, a pseudo-Oriental satire on British society, in a very well-preserved gilt paper binding imitating calf.

    £575

  7. ZARLINO, Gioseffo.

    Le Istitutioni harmoniche … nelle quali; oltra le materie appartenenti alla musica; si trovano dichiarati...

    Venice, [Pietro da Fino], 1558.

    First edition, rare, of ‘arguably the most important and influential book in the history of music theory … [It] opened the way for the new tonality which has governed music from the seventeenth century to the present day’ (PMM).

    £15000

  8. WOLLSTONECRAFT, Mary.

    An Historical and moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution; and the Effect it has produced...

    London, J. Johnson, 1794.

    First edition of Wollstonecraft’s eloquent analysis of the causes of the French revolution, written as an antidote to Burke’s Reflections, our copy with manuscript notes by William Michael Rossetti. The work was never completed before Wollstonecraft’s death in 1797, though the first volume...

    £7250

  9. [WALLPAPER BINDING.]

    ‘Chassereau des Biens et Rentes deves a joseph Paul Roegier et marie margu te [sic] Bourdeau son espouse,...

    Hainaut, 1750–1773.

    A manuscript account book compiled by Joseph Paul Roegier and his son, recording receipts over a quarter-century, in an attractive and unusual binding reusing a large fragment of gilt leather wallpaper.

    £3500

  10. K[IRKE], J[ohn].

    The Seven Champions of Christendome. Acted at the Cocke-pit, and at the Red-Bull in St. Johns Streete, with a...

    London, J. Okes, and are to be sold by James Becket, 1638.

    First edition of this play based on Richard Johnson’s popular romance of 1596, characteristic of the spectacle-dramas staged at the Red Bull, where John Kirke was an actor.

    £6500

  11. [ANTIPHONAL.]

    Very large historiated initial ‘H’ (probably for the antiphon Hodie nata est beata virgo Maria for the...

    Italy (Siena), c. 1300.

    A very fine large initial painted in a style associated with the Master of the Gradual of Cortona, an artist named for a Franciscan gradual produced c. 1290 for the church of San Francesco in Cortona (now Vatican City, BAV, MS Ross. 612).

    £6750

  12. SPILBERGEN, Joris van, and Jacob LE MAIRE.

    Speculum orientalis occidentalisque Indiae navigationum; quarum una Georgii a...

    Leiden, Nicolaes van Geelkercken, 1619.

    First Latin edition of one of the classic Dutch illustrated voyages, identical in format and illustration to the same publisher’s Dutch-language edition of the same year.

    £20000

  13. SIMONETTA, Bonifacio.

    De Christiane Fidei et Romanorum Pontificum Persecutionibus.

    [(Colophon:) Basel, Nicolaus Kesler, 1509.]

    A beautiful copy of the second edition of Simonetta’s principal work, containing an early and intriguing reference to the New World, our copy from the library of Christian VI (1699–1746), King of Denmark and Norway, under whom the kingdom expanded its possessions in the Americas.

    £4500

  14. RUSCELLI, Girolamo.

    Le imprese illustri con espositioni, et discorsi …

    [(Colophon:) Venice, Comin da Trino di Monferrato, 1572.]

    Second edition of one of the finest emblem books of the sixteenth century, illustrated with over one hundred engravings depicting the imprese of notable figures in Italy and beyond, our copy bound for Giacomo Boncompagni, illegitimate son of Pope Gregory XIII.

    £2750

  15. [LINCOLN, Abraham, and Stephen DOUGLAS.]

    Political Debates between Hon. Abraham Lincoln and Hon. Stephen A. Douglas, in...

    Columbus, Follet, Foster, and Company, 1860.

    First edition, later issue, with a rule above the printer’s names on the copyright page and advertisements stating fifteen thousand copies sold, of the Lincoln–Douglas Senate campaign debates of 1858, ‘historically the most important series of American political debates’ (Howes), our...

    £950

  16. STRICKLAND, Hugh Edwin, and A. 

    G. MELVILLE. The Dodo and its Kindred; or, the History, Affinities and Osteology of the Dodo,...

    London, Reeve, Benham, and Reeve, 1848.

    An extra-illustrated family copy of the first scientific monograph on the dodo, and a related flightless bird, the Rodrigues solitaire, with the bookplates of the author and his father and a frontispiece by the author’s wife.

    £7500

  17. ARCHIMEDES, BOETHIUS, and CAMPANO da Novara; Luca GAURICO, editor.

    Tetragonismus id est circuli quadratura per Campanum...

    Venice, [Giacomo Penzio for] Giovanni Battista Sessa, 28 August 1503.

    The first appearance in print of any complete work by Archimedes, ‘generally regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians the world has ever known’ (PMM), including one of the earliest approximations of the value of pi.

    £18000

  18. ARCHIMEDES.

    Τα μεχρι νυν σωζομενα, απαντα … Opera, quae quidem extant, omnia, multis iam seculis desiderata...

    Basel, Johannes Herwagen, [(colophon): March] 1544.

    Editio princeps of the works of Archimedes, ‘the greatest mathematician and engineer of antiquity’ (PMM). Prior to this edition only a small tract in Latin translation, published in 1503, and a partial translation by Tartaglia, published in 1543, had appeared.

    £45000

  19. EUCLID.

    Στοιχειων βιβλ. ιε εκ των θεωνος συνουσιων. Εις του αυτου του πρωτον,...

    Basel, Johannes Herwagen, September 1533.

    Editio princeps of Euclid, the ‘oldest mathematical textbook still in common use today’ (PMM), a work which ‘has exercised an influence upon the human mind greater than that of any other work except the Bible’ (DSB).

    £18000

  20. SCHRÖDINGER, Erwin, et al.

    A collection of offprints and papers from the library of Nándor Balázs.

    1902–1961.

    A remarkable collection of offprints and papers from the library of Hungarian-American physicist Nándor Balázs, laboratory assistant in the early 1950s to the Nobel Prize-winning Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, comprising an exceptionally strong core of Schrödinger’s works – many of...

    £50000