Germany: ? 1700-1735.
Probably the first edition of a peculiar parodic sermon by the entirely fictitious Father John of Schauenberg, in which he likens people, professions, and social classes to birds: The King of Poland, for his aggression, is an eagle; clerics are waddling geese; students, for their capricious inattention.....

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.....

Lisbon: Lino da Silva Godinho, 1781.
First edition, second issue, of the first bibliography of Portuguese law. Though this is the true first edition recorded by Innocêncio, a prior issue, dated 1780, exists, which is distinguished by three instead of five preliminary leaves. The author chose to include, in both.....

Edo: 1860.
[BRADY, Mathew, 1822-1896]; Yoshikazu UTAGAWA fl. 1850-1870. Gaikoku shashin kagami no zu. [Foreigners employing a camera.] Ukiyo-e woodblock print produced by the nishiki-e process. [Edo], 11th month: 1860. A remarkable artefact in the history of photography: an ukiyo-e print featuring Mathew Brady at his camera, produced in November.....

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.....

Naples: 1788.
Only edition. Onofrio Galeota (1732-c1800), Neapolitan pamphleteer, literary bedlamite, and object of vigorous society ridicule, found his calling in writing vituperative jeremiads against the social ills of Naples. He penned dozens of such pamphlets, railing against treacherous fishmongers, venal clergymen, and ordinary highwaymen. In the present pamphlet, Galeota.....

Paris: Galliot du Pré, 1532.
Following his victory in the Battle of Marignano in September, 1515, Francis I of France, barely 21 years of age, negotiated with Pope Leo X to form what would become known as the Concordat of Bologna. It was signed in Rome on August 18, 1516.....

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.....

Tokyo: Yamamura Kinzaburo, Meiji 13-8 [August] 1880.
Sensational series of three narrative color woodblock prints, which together illustrate one of the most notorious crimes in Meiji-era Japan, published a few weeks after the incident. The text cartouche at the head of the leftmost sheet explains the gruesome scene: A young.....

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.....

London: J. Roberts, 1734.
Only Edition. Robert Walpole, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and most influential politician in Great Britain, had come about his power by avoiding foreign wars, and had elevated his popularity (at least among the landed gentry) by reducing the land tax from £4 to £1 over.....

Nuremberg: Johann Petreius, 1529.
First Edition. Remarkable ephemeral pamphlet on the horrors of the highly transmissible and routinely fatal scourge of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries known as sudor anglicus. The English Sweating Sickness, named for its source and its chief symptom, was known in five major outbreaks.....