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.....

? ? 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.....

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.....

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.....

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.....

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.....

Amsterdam? 1770.
Only edition of French poet-philosopher Jean-François de Saint-Lambert's short novel about the ultimate test of friendship between two young Iroquois men, with the action set  in the region of the St. Lawrence River Basin in the period before the 1763 Treaty of Paris. There is no evidence that.....

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: 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.....

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.....

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.....

Only edition. An extraordinary illustrated anatomical record, in the form of a letter to William Petty at the Royal Society in London, from Allan Mullen, Fellow of the College of Physicians in Ireland, describing Mullen's dissection of an African elephant. His opportunity to study the animal arose as the result.....

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.....