This is a stunning printing of Washington's famous message.  The text is printed in gold ink in four-column format within an elaborate engraved border printed in silver on bright white calendered paper. The firm of “White & Durand” is listed in the 1834–35 New York city directory as specializing in “specimens of xylographic engraving and printing in colours” and seems to have done a good business in labels for drug store bottles. An earlier incarnation of the firm “A.B.C. Durand, Wright & Co.” had specialized in banknote engraving as early as 1825, and certainly the border here is of that style and quality.

The firm was renamed in the 1835–35 city directory to “Wright & Prentiss.”

Searches of NUC, WorldCat, and the OPACs of the American Antiquarian Society and the Library of Congressfail to locate any other copies.

•  Date attribution based on admiring notice in an 1834 trade journal. Minor indications at some edges of the item having been pinned or tacked for display; faint instances of old staining at edges, in one case slightly into border.An excellent copy of an important and absolutely lovely production.  (33580)

Provenance:  Front fly-leaf with decoratively flourished inked inscription: “Jn. M. Davis 1799"; title-page inscribed “Jn. Maynard Davis.” Davis, a maritime insurance expert, was one of the founders of the South Carolina Insurance Company; he is thought to have been the first independent insurance agent in America. His particular focus is noted by the sole obvious mark of emphasis here, which points towards a paragraph of the section on wrecks. Grimke (1752–1819) and Davis (professionally active in 1783 and alive through at least 1822) were both South Carolinian Freemasons during the same time period, though from rival lodges; the former was Grand Master of the Free and Accepted Masons, while the latter was Senior Grand Warden of the Ancient York Masons.

•  ESTC W37120; Evans 30519; Cohen, Bibliography of Early American Law, 8466.   Contemporary mottled sheep, covers framed in blind beaded roll, spine with gilt-stamped black leather title-label; moderately rubbed and scuffed overall, spine leather and label with cracks. Pages much foxed and darkened; one leaf with chip out of upper margin; inscriptions and one early inked marginal emphasis mark as above; back fly-leaf with legal term pencilled (“Amerciament”) in an early hand. An important work of early U.S. law, with happy provenance.  (36771)

On 4 July 1776 only two signatures were affixed to the unanimously adopted Declaration of Independence — those of John Hancock, president of the Congress, and Charles Thomson, secretary, in order to authenticate the document that had been voted on and approved.  Yet by a curious twist of fate (read rather, surely, of a political enemy's knife), when the calligraphic copy that is so well known to every school child was ready shortly after 19 July, authenticator Thomson was not invited to sign it!

Its printer was the daughter of Robert Aitken, who had printed the first Bible in English in America. A major edition of the English Bible, this isessential for any Bible collection, not just for collections of American Bibles — though as an American Bible and simple Americanum it has a revered place.

•  Rumball-Petre, Rare Bibles, 184; Hills 153; Herbert 1514; O'Callaghan 91–92; Shaw & Shoemaker 14486; Hedak, Early American Women Printers and Publishers, 20–42. On Thomson, see: Dictionary of American Biography, XVIII, 481–82.   Recent quarter brown calf with stone-pattern marbled paper sides; a lightly tanned set with occasional light spotting only.  A solid and very good set.  (32628)

nothing new since my last, exceptCapt. Barney in the ship Hyder Aly taking the King ship Monk of 10 nine pounders, in an action of 30 minutes. The Hyder Aly mounted 6 nines & 10 sixes, there never was more execution done by the same force in the same time. The Monk had every officer except two, killed or wounded, amongst the latter was the Capt. She had in all 21 kill'd & 32 wounded. The Hyder Aly had 4 kill'd & 11 wounded, from such slaughter no doubt you'd conclude one of them boarded, but it was not the case, a fair action within pistol shot.

Although the land battles of the American Revolution had ended with the surrender at Yorktown, sea battles continued until receipt of the signing of the Treaty of Paris. The account above refers to Comm. Joshua Barney's capture on 8 April off Cape May, NJ, of the sloop of war General Monk. In a wonderful twist of fate, the intrepid Barney had only arrived in Philadelphia in March — having been occupied since the previous May with his escape, recapture, and second escape from Portsmouth prison! into which stronghold he had been clapped by the British for his previous maritime (infr)actions.

Having, then, been given command of the Hyder Ally (a.k.a., Hyder Ali) only a few weeks previously, and having been charged with clearing the Delaware River and Bay of privateers, Barney had met the General Monk while pursuing that task — and, in a Revolutionary War naval action eclipsed only by that of the Bon Homme Richard and the Serapis, took on and thoroughly defeated a King's ship of superior firepower in a bloody, 26-minute battle.

Following this capture of the General Monk, Congress voted Barney a sword for his gallantry and offered him command of his prize after renaming her General Washington. In November, 1782, he was ordered to sail to France in the Washington with dispatches for Benjamin Franklin who was negotiating the Treaty of Paris. He returned with news of the signing of the preliminary peace treaty and with money from the French.

Barney was an American Hornblower!

•  On Barney, see: Dictionary of American Biography and Appleton's Cyclopedia.   Very good condition. Small blank portion of the integral address leaf torn with loss where the sealing wax was attached. Old dealer's (Sessler's) coding in pencil at base of letter.  (31069)

In that yearAntonio Ricardo printed the first book in South America, the Doctrina christiana y catecismo para instruccion de los Indios. Antonio Ricardo was an Italian who began working as a printer in Mexico in 1570 in the shops of other printers, almost certainly principally in that of Pedro Ocharte. In 1577 he became the fifth independent printer in the New World but operated under his own name only until 1579, during which time he worked closely with the Jesuits and printed books for students at the Society of Jesus' Colegio de San Pedro y San Pablo; at the urging of the Society he left Mexico in 1580 to establish his press in Peru. There, however, because of a dispute between the Jesuits and the viceroy, he did not receive license to print until 1584, when the first thing he printed, at the insistence of the viceroy, was a four-page explanation of the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. This was quickly followed bythree tri-lingual books in Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara, all works by members of the Society of Jesus. The Tercero cathecismo is only the third book printed in South America and it shows Ricardo as aware and proud of his position as the first printer in South America. He pointedly identified himself as such on the book's title-page: “Antonio Ricardo, primer impressor en estos Reynos del Piru.”

The Tercero cathecismo's importance is multifaceted and goes far beyond its place as an icon in American printing history, for it provided doctrinally approved sermons both for those priests serving the Spanish population who were less than proficient sermonizers and also, specifically, for thosepriests and missionaries working among the indigenous population whose command of Quechua and/or Aymara was not sufficient for them to be safe and fluent deliverers of the word of God and instruction in Christian ethics and practices. Modern study of these sermons additionally considers which indigenous terms were used to convey European concepts (precursor to the Chinese rites controversy of the late 17th century Jesuit missionaries in China), which Spanish words became loan words in Quechua and Aymara, what indigenous practices were of concern to the religious authorities, and of course which dialect of each language was chosen to be the norm of proselytization.

Ricardo was fond of printing his texts witha mix of type faces and a wide variety of large woodcut initials. The inventory of the type, ornamental letters, woodcut illustrations, etc., that he owned when he sold the press shows that he had amassed huge quantities of all of those elements of the black art. (The inventory is in the Manuscript Division of the New York Public Library, the gift of Edward Harkness.) The Tercero cathecismo prints the Spanish text in italic and the indigenous-language texts in roman, with the Spanish printed margin to margin at the top of the pages and the Quechua and Aymara below it in parallel columns to the left and right respectively. And yes, there is goodly use of several woodcut headpieces, many large woodcut initials (some historiated); curiously, no tailpieces.

Provenance:  18th-century ownership inscription in an upper margin of the library of Colegio de Santa Rosa; which one, not clear.

As one would expect of any book that was among the first productions of a press in a remote region, the Tercero cathecismo is a rare book. Searches of NUC Pre-1956, WorldCat, COPAC, CCPBE, and KVK locate only eight U.S., four European, and two South American libraries reporting ownership. However, we know of one other U.S. and one other European library owning copies.

•  Backer-Sommervogel, I, 34; Sabin 94838; Medina, Lima, 3; Vargas Ugarte, Impresos peruanos, 3; Johnson, The Book in the Americas, 34; Medina, Lenguas quechua y aymará, 4; Viñaza 81.   Recased in possibly original limp vellum; new free endpapers and fly-leaves; evidence of long-gone ties. Title-page in facsimile. Thirteen leaves supplied from a shorter copy (ff. 57, 138, 143, 146, 151, 135, 160, 161, 168, 186, 191, 194, 199); heavy staining to ca. fol. 25 and again at the end, other staining scattered. Worming, mostly pinhole but some meander, with loss of letters, parts of words, and occasionally whole words, seldom with injury to reading; a few leaves with repaired margins and repairs to wormed areas.Obviously a sophisticated copy and one that has seen hardships, nonetheless, a copy ready to repay ownership and study.  (36505)

The anonymously published work is signed “An Antiepiscopalian”; the title-page here bears a hand-inked attribution to Matthew Wilson.

An important entry in the literature of the “American Bishops” controversy in the lead-up to the American Revolution.

Evidence of Readership: Title-page with early inked ownership inscription and annotations, later lined through, with authorial attribution in the later hand; one leaf with early inked annotation along outer margin. Verso of last leaf presents calculations andsomeone's reading list; later X'ed out; among the titles read, intended for reading, or just imaginably noted as not for reading are The Rival Mothers, Pamela or Virtue Rewarded, and Love in a Village.

•  ESTC W13420; Evans 10947; Felcone 126; Hildeburn 2370; Sabin 11876.   Recent binding: boards appealingly covered in paper printed with 18th-century music, front cover with printed paper label. Two pages (not including title) institutionally rubber-stamped. Lacking pp. 17/18, with final leaf tattered and text on p. 19 lined-through-by-show-through of X'es “deleting” manuscript notes on the verso (still, readable); annotations as above. Pages age-toned and lightly spotted, with edges untrimmed.  (28100)

As is the case with the 70 p. issue, the first 16 p. are the same sheets as appear in the original [Richmond, April 1792] edition (Evans 26580), and were probably printed in 1791. Evans, however, postulates that the first 16 p. were printed by Dobson in September 1792. He accounts for their presence in copies of the [Richmond] edition of 60 p. by suggesting that Asplund substituted the corrected Philadelphia sheets for the unsatisfactory sheets of the earlier edition. Cf. the prefaces to the 1794 and 1796 editions, with title: The universal register of the Baptist denomination.”

In addition to its exhaustive account of who's who and what's where, this lists both principles of belief and “Rules of Decorum”; the latter, e.g., forbid laughing and whispering when another member of the association is speaking in assembly. Between the “Rules of Decorum” and the Index, Asplund remarks on the un-Christian “inconsistency” of “Keeping our fellow-creatures in bondage, who have as good a right was we, both to civil and religions liberty — Not only so; but misusing them, concerning common blessings, which certainly is a violation of the rights of nature and inconsistent with a republican government.”

•  Evans 26582; ESTC W37302.   Uncut copy. In 20th-century black buckram binding. Ex-library with bookplate but no other markings.  (24467)

•  ESTC W35823; Evans 35119. Contemporary sheep, spine with red leather title label; abraded with a few wormholes (including one track across spine) and front joint opening. Some pages quite stained, not impairing reading; a couple instances of chipping in margins with loss of letters. Front free endpaper excised. Pp. 433–44 pinned together in the inside margin. Pencil doodlings on half-title and p. [5]. (4563)

Who made the translation is not known, but it is highly likely that it was made for Thomas Larkin (1802–58), an early-arrived American settler in Alta California (April 1832), a signer of the original California constitution, and the first and only U.S consul to the California Republic.

The information in Bandini's report would have been powerful ammunition in Larkin's reports to Washington encouraging American interest in California and its settlement by Anglo-Americans.

Despite the importance of the information contained in Bandini's account of California in the period to ca. 1830, it remained unpublished until 1951, when the Friends of the Bancroft Library published a transcription of the Spanish and a translation into English. This present translation remains unpublished still.

Curiously, while Hubert Howe Bancroft was able to track down and acquired the manuscript history of California written by José Bandini's son Juan (“Apuntes para la historia de la Alta California desde el ano de su fundacion en 1769 hasta el ano de 1845"), he betrays no knowledge in his own history of California of José's work.

Provenance:  The Pacific School of Religion (properly released).

•  See: Bandini, José. Description of California in 1828. Tr. by Doris Marion Wright. Berkeley, CA: Friends of the Bancroft Library, 1951.   Written in a clear secretarial hand on wove paper watermarked “Casa de Vall,” using sepia ink, now faded but evenly so and still readable. Outer wrappers tattered and bug-stained. Document folded three times as to fit in a a pigeonhole storage box; paper somewhat relaxed and flattening, but still notably wavy. Now in a quarter blue morocco clamshell case.  (34728)

•  Shaw & Shoemaker 7007. Original light boards covered with marbled paper. Back cover and two leaves gnawed by a rodent, with loss of paper. (3512)

•  Sabin 3471; ESTC T65667; not in Alden & Landis.   Contemporary sheep, modestly tooled in blind; leather dry and abraded. Ex-library with call number on spine, shelf marks in pencil, bookplate on front pastedown, and rubber-stamp on title-page. (20159)

•  Shaw & Shoemaker 5809. Recently rebound in period-style tan cloth over light blue paper sides, spines with paper labels. Contemporary ownership inscription to front fly-leaf in each volume. Map with light offsetting and short tear just starting along one fold. First 20 leaves of vol. II waterstained and last 10 foxed; otherwise only scattered incidences of spotting in all volumes, pages generally clean. A nice-looking set, and still — as it always was! — a work offering a pleasant way to absorb ancient history.  (2736)

The flap with “Come, read and learn” on the outside and the title and publication data on the inside is present and integral. It is not uncommon for this fragile flap to have been lost.

•  Rosenbach, Children, 428; Welch 1363; Shaw & Shoemaker 14251 and 21546; Hamilton, Early American Book Illustrators, 248; Pomeroy, Alexander Anderson, 330.   Publisher's olive printed paper–covered wrappers. Minor chipping to one top margin of rear cover; adhesion of olive paper from a different copy to the underside of the flap! A very few light stains. A very nice copy of this fragile item.  (33551)

From contemporary records we know that 200 copies of this were printed using new type that had just arrived from England. Few have survived: Via WorldCat, NUC, and ESTC we trace fewer than 12 U.S. libraries reporting ownership and several of the reported copies are incomplete in one way or another: The copy at the American Antiquarian Society consists of only pp. 113–14 and 127–28, and that at the American Philosophical Society of pp. 93–94; the Library of Congress copy lacks the title-leaf; and the John Carter Brown copy lacks several pages; and the Library Company of Philadelphia's copy consists of only six leaves. We have not verified the completeness or not of all reported copies.

Provenance:  From the residue of the Special Collections of the Colgate Rochester Crozer Theology School.

•  Evans 383; Wing (rev. ed.) B1476; ESTC W18530; Pilling, Algonquian, 170–71; Pilling, Proof-sheets, 1189; Sabin 4076. Not in Newberry Library, Ayer Indians; not in Evans, Masinahikan. See also: Winship, The Cambridge Press, 1638-1692, pp. 274–81.   Disbound and lightly stitched in plain wrappers; irregular at the inner margin from glue adhesion, overall dust-soiling. A remarkable fragment of a noteworthy early American indigenous-language missionary production.  (36069)

•  Publisher's marbled paper–covered boards with roan shelfback; binding rubbed overall. Three additional leaves of notes laid in; pages gently age-toned with occasional small spots. A very readable, evocative, wide-ranging compendium.  (37203)

“Gaudentio,” under persecution by the Inquisition, reveals his fantastic voyages and travels through Egypt and an imaginary African land. While constantly assuring the stern inquisitors of his staunch adherence to Catholicism, he gives elaborate, admiring descriptions of the government, religion, and customs of his African utopia, particularly its training and education of women.

Provenance:  Pastedown with contemporary bookplate of James Butler.

•  Evans 35183; ESTC W10142. Not in Parsons; not in Finotti; not in Bowe, List of Additions and Corrections . . . to Parsons.   Contemporary sheep, missing pieces of leather from front cover and top and bottom of spine; spine with nice old red leather gilt label and front cover reattached using Japanese long-fiber method. Silverfish or roach damages to front free endpaper, fly-leaf, and title-page (costing small, small portion of two letters); damage also to lower outer corners of early leaves and upper inner area of leaves to p. 10 of preface with none of this impairing the reader. Age-toned, some foxing, occasional brown spots; an “old book” of the classic sort.  (37157)

•  Evans 36946; ESTC W10143; Minick, Maryland, 560. Not in Parsons; not in Finotti; not in Bowe, List of Additions and Corrections . . . to Parsons.   Publisher's sheep with modest gilt ruling on spine; spine label gone, front free endpaper loose. A few leaves starting to extrude; occasional spotting, but overall strong and good+ to very good.  (37183)

Provenance:  Bookplate on each front pastedown of Mary B. & Otto C. Wierum.

•  Publisher's green cloth, front covers with gilt-stamped signature, spines with gilt-stamped title; vols. I and II sunned (particularly spines, which are also a little scraped), with vols. III and IV not so; extremities rubbed, one index leaf in vol. II torn across, vol. IV with back hinge (inside) cracked. Top edges gilt. Front pastedowns each with private collector's bookplate as above. A very decent though not “fresh” set.  (33170)

The Princeton Library catalogue record for this work states that P.J. Conkwright, the legendary designer and typographer at the Princeton University Press, designed the book. One would suspect that it was printed at the Press as well.

•  New. Bound, as issued, marbled paper boards, black cloth spine with title stamped in gold. Glassine dust wrapper slightly chipped and torn, but present. (37054)

•  Shaw & Shoemaker 1953. On Brown, see: Dictionary of National Biography, VII, 37–38 (under William Laurence Brown). Relatively unworn library buckram; library name pressure-stamped on covers and its bookplate to front pastedown. Hinges reinforced at rebinding with cloth and first few pages fragile along line of reinforcement; front free endpaper separated. Title-page and a few others faintly stamped, title-page with crossed-out ownership inscription. Some offsetting; a very few instances of pencilled underlining; corners occasionally dog-eared or chipped. Overall a fairly decent copy, suffering a bit from earlier "conservation." (2740)

signed at the colophon by the artist

•  Bibliography of the Fine Books Published by the Limited Editions Club, 491.   Binding as above, in original glassine wrapper and paper-covered slipcase; wrapper with a few tiny nicks at spine extremities, slipcase showing minimal shelfwear, volume fresh and clean. A handsome, crisp copy.  (30718)

This may be a later issue of the 1747 first edition; the last line of p. 7 here begins with “de l’esprit” and the first line of p. 223 with “tage au préjudice.” A companion volume to the present work, Principes du droit politique, was to be printed posthumously in 1754 and it is not present here — this volume being a very satisfactory stand-alone, arriving at a conclusion describing the “heureux accord de la lumière Naturelle & Révélée.” (Conceiving of the two works as vols. I and II of a larger whole is an anachronism in period to 1766 when de Felice was to bring them together for the first time.)

•  Not in Brunet. Recent quarter calf over marbled paper–covered sides, spine with gilt-stamped leather labels and gilt-stamped decorations in compartments. Pages age-toned, with light foxing in spots; outer and lower edges of title-page showing offsetting from original turn-ins.  (19006)