![Creative Arts: An Encyclopedia on the Subject of Magic.]. ABDULLAH](/pictures/thumb/225.jpg?v=1649329077)
Istanbul: Mahmud Bey Matbaası, 1895.
Only edition of a remarkable illustrated work on magic and the conjuring arts published for a late-nineteenth-century Ottoman readership. Nothing is known today about the author, who went only by the name Abdullah, though he was evidently in demand as a performing magician in Istanbul.....
Germany: ? 1700-1735.
Probably the first edition of a peculiar parodic sermon by the entirely fictitious Father John of Schauenberg, in which he likens people, professions, and social classes to birds: The King of Poland, for his aggression, is an eagle; clerics are waddling geese; students, for their capricious inattention.....
![Relation de la cour de Savoye [bound with] Portraict de Mademoiselle D. L. V.|. ANON and,...](/pictures/thumb/202.jpg?v=1643632889)
Fribourg and Paris: Pierre Metsker, 1667-1670.
I. [ANON] [Christine de France] RELATION | DE | La Cour de Savoye | OU | LES AMOURS | DE | MADAME ROYALE. | [Woodcut ornament of a squirrel] A PARIS. 1667.
Bound with:
II. [ANON] [DE LA VALLIÈRE, Louise] LE PORTRAICT.....
Lisbon: Joseph Antonio da Silva, 1735.
Only edition of this pamphlet reporting the sudden appearance of a "horrific and formidable beast" outside Constantinople in 1735, and which the anonymous author asserts, with the authority of the Portuguese Inquisition backing him up, is a portent foretelling the demise of the Ottoman.....
![CAPITOLI Coi quali l'Ill[ustrissi]mi Congregazione DELL' OSPITALE DI SANTA MARIA DE' BASTARDINI...](/pictures/thumb/47.jpg?v=1600702529)
Modena: 1774.
One of only a very few known publications issued by the Carpi foundling hospital, a beneficent organization inaugurated in 1690 near Modena for the care and agrarian education of local bastardini. The short pamphlet comprises essentially the set of regulations governing the management of the orphanage's farmland, especially.....
Paris: Prault, Laurent-François, 1773.
A price and measurement guide for various sizes, shapes, and substance (thickness) of pane glass and mirrors, produced for use of glaziers and glass salesmen in the field. In 1722, the Paris guild of glassmakers asked Parlement for permission to print a price guide, and since.....
France: 1450-1500.
Exceptional print of the Merovingian saint-queen Bathilde's vision of her ascent to heaven. Bathilde, an Anglo-Saxon aristocrat sold into slavery in Gaul in the second half of the seventh century, later founded the Abbey of Chelles, near Paris, where her remains were enshrined following her death in 680.....
Lisbon: Lino da Silva Godinho, 1781.
First edition, second issue, of the first bibliography of Portuguese law. Though this is the true first edition recorded by Innocêncio, a prior issue, dated 1780, exists, which is distinguished by three instead of five preliminary leaves. The author chose to include, in both.....
Rome: Minucio Calvo, 1526.
First edition. A remarkable book of firsts in card games and gambling. Francesco Berni, born in Tuscany in the village of Lamporecchio about 1497, was court secretary to Leo X and Clement VII, a world of "glittering literary productivity, where the lines between poet, cleric, and.....
![Африканские письма [Afrikanskiya pis'ma] [Lettres africaines] [African Letters]....](/pictures/thumb/220.jpg?v=1647825615)
Moscow: Universitetskaya tipografiya, 1801.
First and only Russian translation and adaptation of Jean-François Butini's Lettres africaines, a signal antislavery novel originally published at Paris (with a false London imprint) in 1771. Butini, a Geneva jurist and later a Négatif in the Geneva Revolution of 1782, was, along with Gabriel Mailhol.....
London: D. Trench, 1661.
An Edinburgh-printed edition of Archibald Campbell, the Marquess of Argyll's conduct book, addressed to his son, and written while confined in the Tower of London. The Marquess had been charged and tried for complicity in the death of Charles I, a crime for which he was.....
Paris: Jacques Chereau, 1776.
First edition of the essential French "blow book," which, for centuries, was a staple illusion in the working conjuror's armamentarium. First described in print in 1550 by the polymath Girolamo Cardano, a traditional blow book comprises a bound set of illustrated leaves whose fore-edge is trimmed.....
Toulouse: Marguerite de Molinier, 1630.
Only edition of this genuinely odd manual on the nature, prevention, and treatment of plague, composed by the largely forgotten Rabastens physician Estienne Dufaug, and printed by Marguerite de Molinier, at the height of one of the worst outbreaks of plague in southern France. Rabastens.....
London: John Gain, 1687.
Only edition. Richard Franck, a captain in Cromwell's army during the Battle of Dunbar and other Scots campaigns, lived for a few years in America in the 1680s, during which time he composed his Philosophical Treatise, a strange, euphuistic meditation on God, Mosaic Creation, and the.....
Paris: Galliot du Pré, 1532.
Following his victory in the Battle of Marignano in September, 1515, Francis I of France, barely 21 years of age, negotiated with Pope Leo X to form what would become known as the Concordat of Bologna. It was signed in Rome on August 18, 1516.....
Paris? 1578?
A request directed to Henri III of France to reduce the tax burden on the good subjects of Burgundy, arguing by virtue of case studies of suffering Burgundians that existing taxes and obligatory tributes are too large a strain on the tax base. The treshumble request is framed.....
![Edict]. Henry IV of France](/pictures/thumb/236.jpg?v=1652576549)
? ? 1607.
Only known copy of an unrecorded edict, printed on vellum, abolishing the office of the Vice Chancellor and Keeper of the Privy Seal of Navarre, as ordered by Henry IV in April 1607, and approbated by Jean Pancheure, sieur of Lamberdière and secretary to the King. The.....
Marburg: Christian Egenolff, 1542.
Extraordinary court report of the escalating dispute between Heinrich II of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel and the citizens of the Lower Saxony town of Goslar. It all started when Goslar municipal delegate to the 1530 Imperial Diet of Augsburg, Konrad Dellinghausen, failed to come to an agreement with Heinrich.....
Caen: Jean Briard, 1678.
The only known copy of a compelling illustrated Caen almanac, published by the little-known printer Jean Briard. No other almanacs are known from this series, though Briard printed an unrelated almanac the year prior. Authorship of our almanac is vague: Hermitte solitaire could be the sobriquet.....
Paris: Jacques Barois, 1741.
[2711 lots, priced.] The auction catalogue of the diverse and well-balanced collection of Michel Peletier de Souzy [1640-1725], director-general of fortifications for Louis XIV. The collection was managed and expanded by de Souzy's son, Michel-Robert, until his own death in 1740. In those fifteen intervening years.....
Paris? 1516.
Only known copy. On the surface, this bull issued by Pope Leo X on 17 May 1516 is simply a guarantee of a plenary indulgence for anyone who pledges participation in a new campaign against the Ottoman Empire (which he calls explicitly a crusade, in the title), but.....
Cologne: Peter Quentell, 1528.
A fine, compact edition of Johannes Liechtenberger's Pronosticatio latino, and the first to feature Anton Woensam von Worms's lively integral woodcuts. Liechtenberger's reputation as an astrologer and seer has always been suspect (even when he was alive), but his book's renown as a publishing phenomenon is.....
![Ein Predigt von den Engeln. Mart. Luth. Wittemberg. 1531. [Colophon, C4v]: Gedruckt zu Wittemberg...](/pictures/thumb/15.png?v=1586443800)
Wittenberg: Hans Lufft, 1531.
Luther's sermon on angels, preached on the occasion of Michaelmas, 29 September 1530, was ostensibly about the Archangel Michael and the divine college of angels' reverence for God in Matthew 18.10, but the substance of the sermon was actually about fallen angels, in particular the Devil.....
Basel: Oporinus, 1550.
In the 1549 first edition of the Initia doctrinæ physicæ—essentially the first scientific textbook of the Reformation—Philipp Melanchthon refutes the heliocentrism of Copernicus with a single blow, invoking Ecclesiastes 4:5: “The earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun sets.” Moreover, he writes, referring to Copernicus.....
![改正增補蠻語箋 [Kaisei zōho Bangosen] [Revised and Supplemented Barbarian-Language...](/pictures/thumb/80.png?v=1612859859)
Edo: Kenjuku kankō, 1848.
A most compelling and complete Dutch-Japanese dictionary and phrasebook, published in Japan in the transitional moment between the Kōka and Kaei eras in the years before the Meiji restoration and the end of Japan's isolationist policies. The two-volume dictionary would have been of great value to.....