Louvain: Jean Maes and Philippe Zangre, 1596.
First Edition. That men and women could transform into lupine humanoids and devour the innocent under cover of night was a superstitious contagion that swept through Central and Western Europe in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. It was a theological issue.....
Paris: P. Al. le Prieur, 1761.
Fascinating prospectus for an exhibition of a collection of detailed, realistic anatomic models created by Marie Marguerite Biheron, one of the only women in pre-Revolutionary France who prospered in the male-dominated sciences. The prospectus favorably compares Biheron's models to those of her predecessor, 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.....
?Paris: 1614.
First Edition. Scott H. Duvall calls this work a "ribald tract in which the pseudonymous author states that he prefers food and peace to hunger and the tumults of war," and Alain Mercier calls the book "...un catalogue inépuisable des néologismes les plus fous," and excerpts a bizarre.....
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.....