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.....
Macerata: Michele Arcangelo Silvestri, 1704.
A curious Italian-vernacular edition of a venerable text on practical and economic mathematics. Based loosely on the commerical section of Fibonacci's Liber d'abaco, which was composed about 1220 (the earliest of the 19 extant MSS is dated 1237), the Libretto, at just sixteen octavo pages.....
![Item #306 [MILTARY SCIENCE, ASTRONOMY, and MATHEMATICS]. ANON](/pictures/thumb/306.jpg?v=1673625871)
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.....
![Item #298 Untitled. [Confessory.]. ANON](/pictures/thumb/298.jpeg?v=1671042327)
Netherlands or Flanders: c1819.
A fascinating manuscript visual aid to confession for deaf children, very likely copied from a lost archetype produced by an institution for hearing-impaired youth, perhaps located in the Low Countries. Throughout the days of the early church and into the Middle Ages, the Deaf and hearing.....
Rome: Girolama or Baldassare Cartolari, 1543.
First edition of a peculiar jeremiad against heresies and heretics, in two parts, by the almost entirely forgotten theologian Simeone Milanzio Bilina. Bilina may have been a Croatian Uniate (an adherent of the Eastern Greek Rite who still bowed to the Pope) who'd fled.....
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.....
?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: Guillaume Merlin, 1538-1558.
An early French-gothic edition of this series of fifteen meditations on the moments of suffering in the life of Christ, by the Franciscan divine Philip of Aquila. Each effusion is illustrated with a tiny, well-executed woodcut, two of which are signed "G.M.," which is unlikely to.....
Paris: Alain Lotrian, 1541-2.
The last Gothic edition of a most popular French mystery play, originally written by the brothers Arnou and Simon Gréban of Le Mans in the 1450s, and expanded to more than double length by the Angers poet Jehan Michel a generation later. The Gréban original was.....
London: Henry Herringman, 1656.
Gioachino Greco, known as Il Calabrese, or The Calabrian, was considered by Soviet World Champion Mikhail Botvinnik to have been the first professional chess player. Born around 1600 in Celico near Cosenza, Greco was by age 19 considered one of Europe's strongest players. A pioneer of.....
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.....
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.....
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.....
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.....
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.....
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.....
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.....
Paris? Jean Petit, 1514.
A fascinating French vernacular "art of war" vade mecum by the largely unknown Remy Rousseau, dedicated to Charles de Bourbon in the final years of the War of the Holy League. The work, which is divided into ten chapters, draws heavily on Frontinus's Strategemata, with direct.....
Teramo: Presso Berardo Carlucci e Compagni, 1805.
A most interesting general appeal by the Teramo physician Giuseppe Saliceti, addressed to the regional scientific community, for a reconsideration of the practice of iatromathematics, or the application of mathematical laws and precepts to the function and health of the human body. Saliceti.....
![Item #300 刑罪大秘録 [Secret Manual of Criminal Prosecution]. TOKUGAWA SHOGUNATE](/pictures/thumb/300.jpg?v=1672849586)
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.....
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.....