Only edition of British abolitionist William George Alexander's sober yet vehement report of Portugal's perseveration in the illegal international trade in enslaved persons, written as a letter, in the first-person, addressed to the courts and to the citizens of Portugal. The transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans was abolished in Britain.....

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? 1515-1525.
Only known copy of an edition of medieval advice to young people on how to prepare for a life as a domestic. The work belongs to a long late-medieval tradition of doctrinals, or books of advice in verse, and became some of the earlier products of the vernacular.....

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.....

Madrid: Matheo Blanco, 1711.
First edition of Spanish physician Miguel Marcelino Boix y Moliner's first book, a defense of Hippocratic medicine and rejection of Galenism, composed when the author was in his seventies. The work distanced him from colleagues at Madrid, where he had already been under fire for practicing.....

Paris: Guillaume Merlin, 1538-1558.
An early French-gothic edition of this series of fifteen meditations on the moments of suffering in the life of Christ, by the Franciscan divine Philip of Aquila. Each effusion is illustrated with a tiny, well-executed woodcut, two of which are signed "G.M.," which is unlikely to.....

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.....

Paris: Gabriel Martin, 1756.
The catalogue for the auction of the collection of Canon of Notre-Dame de Paris Jean-Omer Joly de Fleury, which featured dozens of portfolios containing thousands of exceptional prints, as well as cabinets of shells, precious stones, odd machines, and anthropological specimens. Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d'Argenville, the authority.....

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.....

Pisa: Jacopo Grazioli, 1785.
Giosuè Matteini, the Pistoiese writer known for fables and mock-heroic poems, diverges here with 556 lines of dense blank verse in pure, unmocking praise of Copernicus and his heliocentric theories. Matteini does not overlook the heroism of the pro-Copernican astronomers that came after him, especially Galileo.....

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.....

First edition. It's not surprising that Abel Matthieu, in advocating a return to a more elegant and balanced French language, chose to have his argument printed by Richard Breton in Philippe Danfrie's civilité type, which itself was a celebration of the beauty of an earlier French secretary hand; a kind.....