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.....

Pavia: Jacob de Burgofranco, 1519.
First edition. A funeral oration and encomium for Giasone del Mayno, the celebrated lawyer and longtime professor of Roman law at Pavia. Composed by Mayno's student and  protégé Sebastiano Sapia in 1519, the year of his mentor's death, the brief work provides a valuable biography.....

Nuremberg: Bauer, 1805-1815.
A splendid and very early example of a miniature didactic globe with accompanying accordion-style booklet bearing 28 hand-colored engravings illustrating peoples of the world in their native dress. The Bauer firm in Nuremberg began producing globes and scientific instruments about 1790, and their miniature globes in various.....

Venice? ? 1537.
First Italian edition, translated from the original Aragonese edition of 1515, of an infamous polemic on Islam, attributed to a scholar of Islamic law after he repudiated his faith and converted to Christianity: Alfaqīh ibn Abdallah renamed himself Juan Andrés following his baptism and ascent to the.....

Bergamo: Francesco Locatelli, 1783.
First Edition. An anonymous letter from an Italian oenophile to a friend, an anonymous Bergamo farmer-nobleman, on the best method for preserving wines. The author, who begins their letter with the salutation Amico, first compliments his or her friend on their agricultural skills, then continues with.....

Augsburg: Hans Schoensperger, 1519.
No other illustrated book from the German Renaissance has been more deeply studied, or bears the same weight of fame, than the enigmatic and controversial Holy Roman Emperor  Maximilian I's hero's journey, the magnificent Theuerdank. We can add nothing to the steep corpus of scholarship, but.....

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.....

Nuremberg: Freidrich Peypus, 1520.
Only edition of a tidy, small-format Währungsrechner, which provides extensive tables that allowed German merchants operating in both domestic and foreign marketplaces to convert the Florentine florin—the base currency for more that 150 European dominions for two and half centuries—into German marks, and vice versa. Use.....

Erfurt: Georg Baumann, 1564.
First edition of an especially virulent astrological prediction for the year 1565 by the Erfurt physician and astronomer Joannes Hebenstreit, who produced prognostications for every year from 1553 until his death in 1569, but exemplars from some of these years have not survived. The text surrounding.....

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.....

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.....

Augsburg: Heinrich Steyner, 1532.
Johann Tallat von Vochenberg's pharmacopoeia and master-book on the art of treating various illnesses first appeared at Memmingen in 1497, and went through more than 20 editions. Our 1532 edition is evidently the last of these, but only the second in which appears a most interesting.....

London: R. Hawes, 1775.
An unattested edition of the founder of Methodism John Wesley's infamous argument for taxing the American colonies, and his general condemnation of Americans, published in the year before Independence. A Calm Address represented a reversal of sentiment on the part of Wesley; until its first appearance.....