A fascinating Sammelband of ten mid-18th-century Spanish-language disaster reports. Two of the publications are dispatches printed in Spain on the infamous Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Four others report the destruction and privation from the same catastrophic event in the cities of Seville, Granada, and the Algerian city of Oran. The.....

Germany: c.1736.
A charming manuscript on general science, with sections on military architecture and fortification, weaponry, astronomy, mathematics, mensuration, horology, and calendar science; each section is illustrated with several dozen well-executed ink drawings highlighted in gouache and watercolor. Secondary mathematics is discussed in some depth, including trigonometric functions and logarithms.....

Krakow: Matthias Scharffenberg, 1536.
A most unusual Neo-Latin poem, written in 1536 as a kind of lament in the voice of the lands of Podolia and Pokuttya in what is now southwestern Ukraine. Composed by the Polish humanist Georgius Ticinus (Jerzy of Tyczyn), the poem is actually a Polish lament.....

Japan: 1855.
Fascinating manuscript vade mecum to the process of gimmi-suji, or the interrogation of suspected criminals in order to obtain confession. At the dawn of the Tokugawa feudal regime in 1600, judicial torture in Japan was legal by force of customary law, which differed from region to region. By.....

Florence: Lorenzo Torrentino, c1551.
The remarkable case of young Margaretha Weiss [1529-?], a girl from the village of Rode outside of Speyer, who, for three years following her tenth birthday, reportedly neither ate nor drank, yet seemed to grow more or less normally, play with her friends, talk, laugh, and.....

?Rome: S.n., c1530.
A very good copy of an early edition of the Portuguese-Jewish apothecary Pedro Damiano de Odemira's illustrated Italian-Spanish chess manual, Libro da imparare giocare à scacchi. It was the first and most important modern practical work on the subject, and was the inflection point between chess el.....

Paris: Richard Breton, 1559.
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.....

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.....

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.....

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.....

London: J. Legat and J. Okes, 1639.
A fine pairing of first editions of the English scientist and husbandman Gabriel Plattes's first two books: A Discovery of Infinite Treasure, a pioneering work on idealized solutions to agriculture problems, and A Discovery of Subterraneall Treasure, one of the first major works.....