? ? 1737.
An unrecorded news report, approbated to print by avocat in the Parlement of Metz Philippe d'Aubertin de Bionville, regarding two English nationals arrested in Le Havre-de-Grâce (the current-day commune of Le Havre) for creating widespread panic by claiming they had been sent by Christ to announce the.....

Barcelona? 1818.
In 1803, the Spanish government began a campaign to vaccinate everyone in all its Spanish territories. The story of the Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition (the so-called Balmis Expedition), is well known as one the first large-scale international public health initiatives. By 1806, many hundreds of thousands had been.....

Amsterdam: Tovmas Vanendec'i for the authors, 1699-1704.
Only editions. Three works of conduct, natural philosophy, and general knowledge, in Armenian, composed and printed by members of the Vanendec'i family of Amsterdam printers, and bound together for a youthful readership. The small-format volume forms a handy, compact encyclopedia, perhaps intended to.....

Three papers on physics and astronomy gathered by fifteen-year-old Joseph von Penckler,  while still a student at the Theresan Military Academy near Vienna. Penckler, who would later become a Lower Austria government functionary and famous debtor, here writes a short presentation to the important scientific papers, obsequiously dedicated to the.....

Rodez: Guillaume Grandsaignes, 1659.
Only edition. A strange relic of the glory days of France's most important and influential 17th-century literary salon, Catherine de Vivonne's Hôtel de Rambouillet. Very few period Gallic literary and social luminaries were not associated with the Hôtel in some way during their careers. Corneille, Balzac.....

Paris: Laurent D'Houry, 1696.
Exceptional example of a seventeenth-century Laurent d'Houry Paris almanac, interleaved, and bound in period retail vellum, decorated and dated in gilt. Grand-Carteret, in his bibliography of  French almanacs and calendars, remarks that the bibliographer Edouard Fournier thought that the earliest in this series of almanacs was.....

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.....

Mexico City: Doña Maria Fernandez de Jauregui. 1809.
The Triumphant Mamluks and the Vanquished Paparos is a most peculiar and fabulous anti-Napoleonic satire in the form of an allegorical short story, told from the point of view of a Spanish patriot who encounters a strange scene along his journey on.....

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.....

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.....

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.....

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.....