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.....

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.....

Strasbourg: Joannes Knobloch, 1516.
Popular German-language epitome of Bolognese astrologer and chiromancer Bartolommeo della Rocca Cocles's Chiromantie ac physionomie anastasis. Cocles discusses, in 23 short chapters, the fundamentals of physiognomy: the nature of the four principal "complexions" (humors), and how to determine the character of a person by not just.....

Wittenberg: Josef Klug, 1529.
Caspar Huberinus, a Bavarian transplant to Augsburg, was a late but ardent supporter of Luther and the Protestant cause: Huberinus's first book, a kind of commiseration and admission of confraternity with "secret Protestants"—incipient reformers still in the closet, as it were—did not appear until 1525. The.....

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.....

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.....

Lyon: Antoine de Harsy, 1582.
First edition of Gabriel Chappuys's French translation1 of Antonio de Torquemada's fantastical Jardín de flores curiosas, a miscellany on the marvels of the world written as a series of dialogues and trialogues, in six treatises, or "days," between three philosophers, Bernard, Antoine, and Louis. The.....

London: Tonson and Downing, 1708, 1720.
I. [WARD, Ned] The Delights of the Bottle. With: II. [PHILIPS, John] CYDER. A | POEM.  In TWO BOOKS.  The London publican and satirist Ned Ward is best known for his newspaper, The London Spy, which ran in 18 monthly installments from 1698-1700, and advertised itself.....

Lisbon: 1765.
Chapbook report of the trial and sentencing of one Jacintho Yorc for the "tyrannical" murder of his young wife, Luciana Kin, in Transylvania in July of 1765. Much of the reportage centers around the sensationally grisly torture and execution of Yorc, who was burned with red-hot irons, his.....