Provenance:  From the library of American collector Albert A. Howard, small booklabel (“AHA”) at rear.

•  Renouard, Alde, p. 85, no. 9; UCLA, Aldine Press: Catalogue of the Ahmanson-Murphy Collection (2001), 164; Kallendorf & Wells, Aldine Press Books, 157; EDIT16 CNCE 328; Index Aurel. 100.913; Adams A262.   Binding as above. Light waterstaining to foremargins, perhaps more than occasional but not throughout; in fact, a clean and handsome copy.  (40776)

The volume is printed with the original language and spelling preserved, and is illustrated with a woodcut frontispiece of a fisherman taken from de Worde's 1518 edition that is cited as the earliest known depiction of an angler fishing with a rod, as well as with six woodcuts (provided at the back of the volume in the form of four plates) showing types of poles, hooks, etc. The title-page proclaims this as printed with the types of John Baskerville, making it one of the last such printings done in England, and most cataloguing follows suit; but Kelly identifies the font used as the elegant “Fry” Baskerville variant developed by typefounder Isaac More.

This copy uncut and in original boards: RARE THUS.

•  NSTC 2B20037; Keynes, Pickering, 42; Kelly, Checklist of Books Published by William Pickering, 1827.1 (p. 21). Beyond the scope of Gaskell, Baskerville.   Publisher's dun-colored light boards. Uncut copy. Light overall rubbing; spine with minor loss of paper. Old bookseller's description affixed to front free endpaper; small oval stain to corner of half-title and frontispiece, a bit of light offsetting from plates. A very nice copy in a later open-back cardboard slipcase.  (30461)

Provenance:  Title-page, rear free endpaper, and rear pastedown rubber-stamped “Ex libris Augustini Mueller.” Later from the residue of the stock of the F. Thomas Heller bookselling firm (est. ca. 1928).

•  Goldsmiths'-Kress no. 29998.   19th-century quarter brown sheep, marbled paper–covered sides in a Spanish wave and shell vein pattern; spine with gilt-stamped red leather title-label, blind-tooled decorative motif in center, and small gilt roll bands. Binding moderately rubbed overall, more so at edges, extremities, and joints; light to moderate foxing, one page with small area of tiny ink splatters in outer margin; large Mueller rubber-stamp as noted. A sound, more than serviceable copy of this interesting work.  (40072)

•  Not in Weale & Bohatta.   Bindings as above, edges and extremities rubbed, spine leather with tiny cracks, one spine head chipped, one joint starting. Ex-library with bookplates, rubber-stamp on lower edges of pages of the closed volumes. One volume with text block separating from spine and sewing loosening; this with the most leather rubbed away and the darkest instances of the usually-light waterstaining and spots of foxing seen occasionally throughout. Endpapers bear early inked ownership inscriptions and annotations. An elegant quartet.  (12406)

Documents such as these showing the growth and development of haciendas in the central part of Mexico are fairly common but extremely uncommon for the Yucatan. Similarly colonial-era documents in Nahuatl are fairly commonly available in the marketplace but comparable ones in Maya are rare. This is the first gathering of land documents for the Yucatan and the first manuscripts in Maya that PRB&M has had in its decades of dealing in Mexican colonial-era manuscripts — see images below for the latter.

(We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the state archive of the Yucatan in explaining the significance of the stamps of the Land Inspection Section that appear in some of the documents. It is good to be assured that they are indication of private, not government, ownership.)

•  Each cahier is housed in a Mylar sleeve and the five are contained in a blue cloth clamshell box. Condition is extremely variable: as above, one cahier has extensive worm/insect damage, another has faded ink, and others are just fine. Stamps are present as mentioned above. A rare surviving compilation and one that is instructive from multiple perspectives.  (40308)

Arthur Fenner was the fourth Governor of Rhode Island from 1790 until his death in office in 1805 and Dorrance was a justice of the Court of Common Pleas. The root of all the litigation was whether Dorrance had swapped the cadaver of a suicide for a hat.  Needless to say, there is political animosity at work here.

The whole was “carefully compiled from notes correctly taken by several gentlemen who were present during the whole course of the trial.”

•  Shaw & Shoemaker 2156; Cohen, Bibliography of Early American Law, 11968.   Removed from a nonce volume, lacking the wrappers. Age-toning and a few spots of foxing. Else very good.  (39246)

WorldCat reportsonly four U.S. institutional holdings of this attractive Antoine-Augustin Renouard printing. While this copy does include the half-title, the engraved portrait cited by OCLC as appearing in some copies is not present here (with the volume showing no signs of its ever having been present).

Binding:  Contemporary mottled calf, covers framed in gilt roll, spine gilt extra with gilt-stamped leather title-label; board edges with single gilt fillet, turn-ins with gilt roll resembling but not identical to cover roll. All edges gilt.

•  Binding as above, showing rubbing to spine, joints, and extremities. Portrait reported in some copies not present here; pages with scattered instances of mild spotting. An elegant little testament to the enduring influence of this work, progressive for its day.  (38421)

•  Publisher's black and red printed paper wrappers, in original similar dust wrapper; dust wrapper with chips and short tears to margins (longer closed tear from upper front edge), spine slightly sunned. Front free endpaper with contemporary inked ownership inscription. Two leaves with short tear from lower margin, touching text without loss. Pages age-toned, embrittled as expectable; in fact, a nice copy, and with a “Three Seal Book Mark” laid in.  (28422)

•  Publisher's quarter floral-patterned paper with woodgrain-patterned paper–covered sides, spine with black leather title-label stamped in silver, in original matching slipcase; one corner bumped and spine extremities with small chips, slipcase showing moderate shelfwear and with one upper edge split and repaired with archival tissue. Pages clean. Internally very appealing despite minor external wear.  (39805)

Provenance:  Front pastedown with armorial bookplate of George Henry Cherry; front fly-leaf with early stamped inscription (strongly resembling handwriing) of Vernon J. Watney, Cornbury (author of Cornbury and the Forest of Wychwood).

•  Brooks 494; Giani 37 (p. 46); Schweiger, II, 413. Not in Brunet, not in De Lama.   Binding as above; joints, spine, and extremities lightly rubbed, sides with a few small spots of minor darkening. First and last pages mildly foxed. One of Bodoni's most neoclassically restrained productions, in a rather less restrained binding. (40156)

To that text he has added wonderfully striking woodcuts by the T.M.P.'s long-time artist Artemio Rodríguez and a working replica volvelle.

In his introduction Pascoe tells us about the press that Enrico Martinez used, the later printings of the Repertorio, and the special characters that were recast for this edition “en homenaje a los 480 años de imprenta en México-Tenochtitlán.”

Limited to 150 copies: “Florencia Ramírez compuso las letras de caja Poliphilus Blado, Castellar, con la cruz fourchée tallada por Antionio de Espinosa en 1554 y el punto alargado de Enrico Martínez, 1600. Juan Pascoe y Martín Urbina imprimieron . . . [el libro] sobre papel de hilo De Ponte” (colophon).

•  Laced-in binding of wrappers with paper label on front wrapper. As issued, new, beautiful. (40676)

An extremely popular work (it went through 25 editions after its first appearance in 1771), the work describes the adventures of an unnamed man, who, after engaging in a heated discussion with a philosopher friend about the injustices of Paris, falls asleep and finds himself in a Paris of the future.

Though condemned by French and Spanish authorities andforbidden by the Inquisition, the work was nonetheless a roaring success in Europe, going through numerous editions in multiple languages — and serving as a groundbreaking, genre-defining example of a futuristic paradise set in a real-world location. The present example is an unidentified imprint of the greatly expanded three-volume text of 1786, followed by Mercier's allegorical L'homme de fer. Wilkie suggests that this “nouvelle édition avec figures" was printed by Changuion in Amsterdam; each of the three books of the main work opens with its own tipped-in engraved plate, making thisone of the earliest illustrated editions.

•  Wilkie, Mercier's L'An 2440, 1787. Not in Brunet, not in Graesse.   Contemporary mottled sheep, spine with raised bands, gilt-stamped leather title-label, and gilt-tooled compartment decorations; spine and edges much rubbed, with spine extremities chipped. Front and back pastedowns with traces of red wax adhesions; endpapers with offsetting from turn-ins. Minor age-toning throughout; one page with early inked annotation. Though battered, a solid, early, nicely illustrated example of this landmark work.  (38525)

•  Publisher's color-printed paper wrappers, spine chewed and overall with soiling; back cover with tear from upper edge into text without impairment to reading. Paper age-toned; some text pages ragged at edges, again, without harm to reading.  (26935)

This volume for connoisseurs offers two distinct parts: first, the text printed and all the illustrations present as fully colored, delicately washed in shades of pink, blue, purple, grey, white, and earth tones; and second, a set of the illustrations in proofs uncolored and without text. Most of the illustrations in both suites areinitialed by Caruchet.

Jean Emmanuel Charles Nodier (1780–1844) was a French author and librarian, appointed to the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal in 1824. His literary stylemuch influenced the Romantics, including Victor Hugo and Alfred de Musset. This legend, first published in La Revue de Paris (1838), is representative of his fantastical oeuvre. It was later adapted into a French opera (Béatrice, 1914) and a film (1923).

Signed Binding: Crushed half milk chocolate morocco over marbled paper boards signed “V. Champs,” gilt author, title, and date to spine; patterned marbled endpapers (different from the covers). Original gilt and hand-colored stiff cream wrappers bound in, showing Béatrix full-figure on the front, her hands extended outward beneath the gilt title.

Provenance: An initialed ink inscription beneath the Justification du tirage states this copy was “Offert à Madame Conquet” — who must have been related toM.L. Conquet, “the great Paris publisher of works of the romantic school,” whose publications were famous for being very limited editions and for the “high artistic quality of their illustrations” (“Books and Authors,” The New York Times, 26 March 1898).

•  Carteret, V, 141; Vicaire, VI, 179.   Binding as above. One small nick on the front leather near the spine, and board extremities (paper and leather) lightly rubbed. The publisher's authentication embossed stamp below the limitation statement. Text clean, unblemished. Simply, excellent.  (30135)

•  Contemporary vellum over paste boards. Ex-library: Call number label removed from spine with noticeable result, bookplate, library name rubber-stamped on bottom edges of closed book, pressure-stamp on title-page. Librarian's pencil markings. Withal, a very nice copy.  (21305)

Binding: Publisher's blue cloth, front cover pictorially stamped in cream, black, and gilt, spine stamped in cream and black.

•  Binding as above, minor rubbing to extremities, a few spine letters with tiny spots of rubbing. One leaf with lower outer corner torn away. Clean and fresh.  (28606)

Binding:  Publisher's arabesque-printed cream paper–covered sides with vellum shelfback, covers elaborately and beautifully gilt; diapered endpapers and all edges gilt.

Provenance:  From the children's book collection of Albert A. Howard, small booklabel (“AHA”) at rear.

•  Osborne Collection, p. 593; McLean, Joseph Cundall, p. 48; Darton, Children's Books in England (3rd ed.), pp. 234–35.   Bound as above, sides slightly darkened and rubbed with gilt dimmed; back hinge (inside) tender. Front pastedown with pencilled inscription of Mrs. W., dated '44. Pages age-toned with occasional minor smudges; guard leaves present for all four plates. A nice copy of an uncommon item.  (40805)

This is a copy of the first edition. The cataloguers at the John Carter Brown Library note: “Two concurrent editions of this work exist: in the first the title page reads “S. Antonio de Padua”; in the other it reads “San Antonio de Padua.” Significant typographical, diacritical, and resetting differences, as well as a lack of printed errata on leaf [3] verso, 1st count, exist in the second edition.

(In 1995 Bill Reese & PRB&M partnered in acquiring a number of important colonial-era Mexican books and manuscrpts. Among them was a copy of this 1673 Vetancurt Nahuatl grammar, and PRB&M wrote the explanation of the work's importance that is used above. Because it is the joint property of the William Reese Company & PRB&M, you may see it used in either firm's catalogues and on-line listings, neither of us pilfering from the other.)

Provenance: Very earlymanuscript ownership inscription of Manuel Bardon in Nahuatl on title-page; slightly later ownership signture of Fray Alonso de Escamilla on the recto of the first leaf of the approval (i.e., aprobacion); later marcas de fuego of the Convento de San Francisco de Mexico on top and bottom edges.

•  Viñaza 204 (failing to note error in foliation, as do all bibliographies except Graff); Medina, Mexico, 1103; Newberry Library, Indian Linguistics in the Edward E. Ayer Collection, Nahuatl 237; García Icazbalceta, Lenguas, 80; H. de León-Portilla, Tepuztlahcuilolli, 2816; Sabin 99385; Pilling 4002. Graff 4475 (this copy; giving correct collation); Ugarte, Obras escritas en lenguas indigenas de Mexico, 422. On the marcas de fuego, see: Sala, Marcas de fuego, p. 7; and Catálogo Colectivo de Marcas de Fuego (BF 12053). On Vetancurt, see: Archivo biográfico de España, Portugal, e Iberoamérica, fiche 118, frames 17–36 and 73–74.   Contemporary limp vellum with remnants of leather ties, minor wear; black- and red-printed waste-paper endpapers from a roman breviary; minor dampstaining. Wear and some staining to the last four leaves. Overall a very good copy.  (39462)