[Numismatics] Fulvio, Andrea. ILLUSTRIUM IMAGINES. Rome: Jacopo Mazzocchi, 1517. Considered the second book to be devoted to numismatics and the first to show illustrations of coins. Small 8vo. An attractive copy in 18th-century Italian vellum with original hand lettering on the spine. The well-known title page within its woodcut border is here trimmed and mounted. The present copy has 119 (of 120) leaves, lacking 2D4 with its two portraits, that is provided in facsimile laid in. The portrait space on the recto of D2 (folio XVIII) is blank, as in all copies. This copy has an additional leaf following the title page, apparently added at the time of the present binding, with a manuscript copy of the colophon information that appears on the last page of the text: mperatorum, et illustrium Virorum ac Mulierum vultus ex antiquis nomismatibus expressi : emenda tum correptumq. Opus per Andream Fulvium, diligentissimum Antiquarium. Impressum Romae apud Jacobum Mazochium, Rom. Achad. Bibl. Anno MDXVII. Approximately a third of the coin images and circular inscriptions are based on actual examples seen by Fulvio, the rest are purely imaginary. The striking images and their elaborate frames were long thought to be by the Venetian artist Ugo de Carpi but recent scholarship indicates they might be by Giovanni Battista Palumba, a member of the artistic circle of Pope Leo X. The colophon date is given here as XV November, as in almost all copies, although at least one is known to have an earlier date, VII November. In Christian Dekesel’s (1997) census of copies in known collections, besides the single copy with the VII date, there are 6 with the XV date and another 18 which have not been examined. Presumably the present copy was not included in the 25 known to Dekesel. In addition, there is a record of one copy known to be printed on vellum, from the Henry E. Huntington collection (the Hoe copy,) that was auctioned at the Anderson Gallery in New York in 1917 for $375.00. John Cunnally, in his 1999 book, Images of the Illustrious: The Numismatic Presence in the Renaissance, writes: “Beginning in 1517, with the publication of Andrea Fulvio’s Illustrium Imagines, the coins themselves were joined by another kind of object that could be collected, circulated, exchanged, and given away, and which seemed to gush forth from its own perennial vein – the numismatic book.” [Numismatics in the Age of Grolier p. 18; Harvard/Mortimer-Italian 203; Dekesel p.378] $5,750.00
The first numismatics book with illustrations of coins
One of 75 exemplaires sur Velin with an inscription by Morpeau
Morpeau, Louis, Editor. ANTHOLOGIE D’UN SIÈCLE DE POÉSIE HAÏTIENNE 1817 – 1925. Avec une etude sur la Muse haïtienne d’expression française et une etude sur la Muse haitienne d’expression creole. Les morceaux choisis de chaque auteur sont precedes de notices bibliographiques, critiques et biographiques. Preface de M. Fortunat Strowski, Professeur a la Sorbonne. Paris: Éditions Bossard, 1925. One of 75 exemplaires sur Velin with a four-line personal inscription by Morpeau dated 6 Avril 1926. Near fine in printed wrappers. The right edges are all untrimmed, resulting in the wrappers and some of the pages in each signature extending well beyond the text block on the fore edge. The wrappers therefore, front and back, show some edge tears and minor losses. Laid in is a printed invitation for a Cours de M. Alfred Martineau sur La Littérature Haïtienne d’Expression Française 1804-1925, with Audition de poèmes de “l’Anthologie d’un Siècle de Poésie Haïtienne” de M. Louis Morpeau, at the Collège de France for Le Mardi 5 Janvier 1926. $375.00
[Joyce, James] Charles Duff. JAMES JOYCE AND THE PLAIN READER.
With a Prefatory Letter by Herbert Read. London: Desmond Harmsworth, 1932. Near fine in light green cloth with crisp orange lettering on the spine. The text is clear and unmarked but there is some light off-setting from the dust jacket on the front and rear end papers. The dust jacket is very nice with an elegant front panel featuring a line drawing of Joyce by the publisher, Desmond Harmsworth, that does not appear elsewhere in the text. The spine is lightly sunned and there is some chipping at the upper spine. Duff’s critical essay on Joyce, an early publication of this kind, with an Appendix giving a brief bibliography followed by a short list of critical writings. The errata slip is not present, however, there is a one-page advertising sheet laid in, printed on one side, for the novel Plummer’s Cut by Basil Maine, which had just been issued by Harmsworth. The dust jacket, with the drawing, is quite scarce in as nice condition as here. There was a second edition later in the same year that has the same jacket drawing set within a frame. $125.00
Morris, William. THE WOOD BEYOND THE WORLD. Frontispiece designed by Edward Burne-Jones and engraved on wood by W. Speilmeyer. Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1894.
Printed in black and red by William Morris using the Chaucer type. One of 350 copies on paper, bound in limp vellum. In addition to its place in the Kelmscott Press canon, this work, along with Morris’s pendant, The Well at the World’s End, both of which Morris created out of his devotion to medieval romances and Norse traditions, were known to have had a great influence on C. S. Lewis’s Narnia sequence. The text is crisp and unmarked, with the bookplate of U.S. ambassador and diplomat Henry Morgenthau. The original stiff vellum binding shows light shelf dusting and the faint outline of a small ‘star’ shelf sticker on the lower spine. The ties are clipped, front and back. [Peterson A27] $3,500.00
eBay
Henry James’s first published extended work of fiction
James, Henry. POOR RICHARD. Boston: The Atlantic Monthly, June No. 116, July No. 117, and August No. 118, 1867. Very good, with minimal spine loss at some of the extremities, light shelf wear and some light foxing, each firmly bound in the original printed wrappers. These three successive issues of The Atlantic Monthly serialize Henry James’ story, Poor Richard, his first published extended work of fiction and the earliest of his published stories that he would see reprinted and preserved in book form in his lifetime. Leon Edel treats the writing of Poor Richard extensively in Henry James: The Untried Years, 1843-1870, the first volume of his definitive biography. The story centers on three young men in their mid-twenties who compete for the attentions of Miss Gertrude Whittaker, the wealthy young heroine, during a summer vacation in rural New England. Two of them had served as officers in the Civil War but the third, Richard Clare, had avoided the army and instead remained in school. Richard soon becomes aware of his worldly inadequacies in relation to the officers, “as he gulped down the sickening fact of his comparative, nay, his absolute ignorance of the great world represented by his rivals, he felt like anticipating its consequences by a desperate sally into the very field of their conversation.” Along with much of James’ early fiction, Poor Richard is auto-biographical and Edel associates Gertrude Whittaker with Minny Temple, a distant cousin of Henry James to whom James later “consecrated the most moving of his chapters of memory” in Notes of a Son and Brother (1914.) In the summer of 1865 James, along with his good friend Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Holmes’ friend, Judge Advocate John Chipman Gray, Jr., had visited North Conway in the White Mountains where the four Temple sisters were also staying and each courted Minny. Edel further identifies Minny Temple with Isabel Archer, who also had three lovers in The Portrait of a Lady and finally, with Milly Theale in James’ late masterpiece, The Wings of the Dove, thus making it clear that the events of 1865 in North Conway led James into a continuing fictional theme from this first extended story through his two major novels. James later included Poor Richard, in revised form, in his three-volume collection, Stories Revived (1885.) Although single copies of The Atlantic Monthly from this period can occasionally be found, these form a uniform set, all having the same small subscriber’s slip pasted to the front wrapper, and make up an important Jamesian artifact. [Edel & Laurence D37] $400.00
[Gambling Broadsheet] T.N. (Thomas Neale) Groom-Porter. A PROFITABLE ADVENTURE TO THE FORTUNATE, AND CAN BE UNFORTUNATE TO NONE.
London: Printed by F. Collins, in the Old Bailey, Printed Decemb. 5, 1693; Reprinted Feb. 6, 1694. As “Groom-Porter,” an official of the Court responsible for gambling and lotteries, Neale is reputed to have successfully raised the intended million pounds with this lottery during the reign of William and Mary. Thomas Neale (1641-1699) is now seen either as a distinguished and far-sighted public servant or as a somewhat unsavory schemer. An MP for thirty years, he was also the first Postmaster General of the colonial United States, and Master of the Mint until succeeded at his death by Isaac Newton, yet Macaulay dismisses him as an “adventurer.” A very scarce broadside measuring 7½ x 12 inches, and printed on both sides. Very good. Free of markings but slightly darkened and with a central horizontal fold. $2,750.00
Donne, John. POEMS BY J. D. WITH ELEGIES ON THE AUTHORS DEATH.
Three farthings is the woorth of this Book
Donne, John. POEMS BY J. D. WITH ELEGIES ON THE AUTHORS DEATH. London: Printed by M. F. for John Marriot, and are to be sold at his Shop in St. Dunstan’s Church-yard in Fleet-Street, 1635. This is the second edition (first in octavo,) following the first edition of 1633 issued by the same publisher, with both being quite scarce. This second edition is the first to have the poems separated into sections, headed Songs and Sonets, Epigrams, Elegies, Epithalamions, Satyres, Letters, Divine Poems, etc., and is also the first edition to have the engraved frontispiece portrait of the author which is bound in here in an excellent facsimile (a number of the extant copies of the 1635 Marriot edition are also found lacking the original portrait.) According to Keynes’s summary in his bibliography of Donne, “in this edition the pieces have been rearranged and there are some changes to the text; they include all that had appeared in 1633 with the exception of Basse’s Epitaph upon Shakespeare, and Thomas Browne’s elegy on the author. Of the thirty-seven pieces that have been added twenty-nine are poems supposed to be by Donne; of these one appears twice and eleven are not accepted as genuine. This edition contains therefore seventeen additional poems by Donne. The Hexastichon ad Bibliopolam. Incerti on A4b is also an addition.” The text is complete, with the Errata on Dd8a, and in generally good condition, however with a somewhat worn title page and with the facsimile portrait. The restored binding retains the contemporary leather front and back panels but has recently been re-backed with a gilt lettering piece. Donne’s name is written out on the title page after his initial “D” and there are a few other early markings as well. There is the late 18th-century ex-libris of Gregory Lewis Way on the front pastedown. Gregory Lewis Way (1756-1799) was educated at Eton and Oxford, then chose the life of an Essex country gentleman with antiquarian interests whose avocation was poetry. A volume of his poems was published in 1782 and his memoirs along with those of his son, were published in 1845 with a Preface by William Wordsworth. He also translated Fabliaux, or Tales, abridged from French Manuscripts of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, by M. Le Grand, assisted by George Ellis who completed the second volume after his death and contributed a wonderful memoir of Way, in part: “His principal amusement was literature, and particularly poetry: and from this choice of occupations and amusements, a choice dictated partly by reflection, and partly, perhaps, by the effects of a situation and early habit, he certainly acquired such a constant flow of cheerfulness, as a life of more activity and a greater variety of resource, often fails to produce.” The front blank has a 1781 Cambridge University ownership signature and an unimpressed earlier owner had written on the verso of Dd8b (blank,) in what appears to be a late 17th-century hand: “Three farthings is the woorth of this Book.” In a custom clamshell box. [The 1633 edition is No. 25 in the Grolier Club’s One Hundred Books Famous in English Literature; Keynes 79] $8,500.00
Del Rio, Martin Antonio. DISQUISITIONUM MAGICARUM LIBRI SEX, IN TRES TOMOS. Mainz: Johann Albin, 1603.
One of the earliest folio editions of the complete text of Del Rio’s late 16th-century encyclopedic treatise on magic in a notably well-preserved binding, very appropriate to the book, of contemporary blind-tooled pigskin over wooden boards with the original brass catches and clasps intact. The spine has the original hand-written title, author and library number and the front panel has the circular gilt ownership stamp of the ALTENBURG BIBLIOTH. SCHOL. The engraved title has an historiated border showing 11 scenes from Exodus, with two excised portions in the upper and lower blank margins. Occasional heavy browning occurs throughout the text. Each of the three parts is separately paginated and the folding plate in part two at p. 91 is present. Martin Del Rio (1551-1608) was a scholarly Jesuit living in the Netherlands but born in Spain, whose writings were well respected and widely published throughout Europe beginning with an edition of Seneca at age nineteen. This work was completed and published in Louvain in 1599 and the present edition may be the first with all of the six books to be published outside of the Netherlands. Del Rio brought a scholarly approach to the study of the various aspects of magic, natural, artificial, delusory, and demonic, and many of his references preserve early sources that would otherwise have been lost. But, through his recommendations on how to deal with the practitioners of magic and overcome their effects, the influence of Disquisitionum Magicarum came to rival that of the 15th-century Malleus Maleficarum, going through at least 20 editions, the last in Venice in 1747,* and is generally thought to have revived the extremely harsh treatment for those accused of witchcraft and other forms of sorcery. *The first English translation, edited by P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, was recently issued by Manchester University Press.$4,000.00
[Crane, Hart] FIRST DAY COVER honoring the launching of the Liberty ship S. S. Hart Crane, named for the poet.
A 7-1/2 x 3-7/8 inch stamped envelope, postmarked Long Beach, Calif. Dec 22 ’43, with a five-line heading typed vertically at the left: “First Day Cover – Launching of / S. S. HART CRANE”, / California Shipbuilding Corporation, / Terminal Island, California, / Wednesday, December 22, 1943. In addition, it bears the signature, Pauline Conyes, above a device, stamped in red, reading “Help Speed National Defense.” The S. S. Hart Crane, Liberty ship number 2551, was sold for private use in 1947, after the war, and finally scrapped in 1966. These transport ships were each assembled in just weeks and named for prominent (deceased) Americans. Groups that raised $2 million dollars by selling War Bonds could propose a name for a Liberty ship. However we have not determined how the name Hart Crane was selected or the connection of Pauline Conyes to the launching. An interesting ephemeral item nonetheless and not without its ironies. $65.00
Brontë, Emily Jane. GONDAL POEMS.
Now First Published from the MS. in the British Museum. Edited by Helen Brown & Joan Mott. Oxford: Printed at the Shakespeare Head Press and published for the Press by Basil Blackwell, 1938. Two full-page facsimiles are reproduced in the text. The printed note on the front of the dust jacket states: “The MS. now edited for the first time contains 44 poems in Emily’s handwriting, of which two complete poems and large parts of two others have not been printed in any collection of her Works. Other poems present important variants from the versions previously printed.” Fine in dark orange cloth and gilt spine lettering, in a near-fine dust jacket showing only the most minor wear but very attractive. With the ex-libris of museum benefactor, Molly Flagg Gibb. $375.00
