Continental
Contact Alex Day, Andrea Mazzocchi, Jonathan Harrison, Charlotte Miller or Sally Deegan
Our Continental department specialises in incunabula, Greek and Latin classics, early vernacular imprints, and notable texts from the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the early modern era, with a specific section devoted to medieval manuscripts, fragments, and illuminations.
We regularly issue lists and catalogues, offering a wide variety of literary, historical, and philosophical books printed in Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, the Low Countries, Eastern Europe, and Russia. Woodcuts, early engravings, notable bindings, notable marginalia, rare manuscript or printed survivals, and books with a remarkable provenance are among our keenest interests and feature regularly in our stock.
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SALLUST.
Caii Sallustii Crispi quae extant.
London, James Tonson and John Watts, 1713.
First Maittaire edition. The French-born classical scholar Michel Maittaire (1668–1741) studied at Westminster, and then under Robert South at Christ Church, Oxford. He is best known for his Annales Typographici and the series of duodecimo classics that he published with Tonson and Watts...
£300
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SALLUST.
C. Crispi Sallustii opera omnia quae exstant, ex recognitione Iani Gruteri. Accedunt castigg. annotat. notae, ac scholia...
Frankfurt, Zacharias Palthenius for Jonas Rosa, 1607.
The works of Sallust edited by the philologist and librarian Jan Gruter (1560–1627), with profuse annotations at the beginning attributed to the Dutch professor Willem Coetier (1647–1723) of Franeker.
£1500
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‘SANCTA CLARA, Abraham a’, i.e. Johann Ulrich MEGERLE.
Coraggio e viltà, l’uno nella virtù, l’altra nel vizio....
Trento, Giovanni Parone, 1717.
Scarce first and only Italian edition of Abraham a Sancta Clara’s emblematic moral treatise Huy! und Pfuy! der Welt, printed in Trento with one hundred striking – albeit somewhat provincial – woodcuts after the engravings in the first German edition of 1707.
£2250
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[SARPI, Paolo (pseud.).] ‘Pietro Soave POLANO’.
Historia del Concilio Tridentino di Pietro Soave Polano. Seconda...
Geneva, Pierre Aubert, 1629.
Second edition, the first to omit the extraneous additions of the 1619 edition introduced by Marco Antonio de Dominis, of the influential and groundbreaking history of the Council of Trent by Paolo Sarpi (1552–1623), described by Milton as ‘the great unmasker’.
£450
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[SAVONAROLA, Girolamo.] Ambrogio Caterino POLITI.
Discorso … contra la dottrina, et le profetie di Fra Girolamo Savonarola.
Venice, Giolito, 1548.
First edition of a condemnation of Savonarola’s theology, doctrine and prophecies by the former Savonarola acolyte Politi (1484–1553), ‘one of the most fiery Catholic polemicists of his times’ (Bongi, trans.), who four years earlier had published a confutation of Luther’s theology.
£1500
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[SAVOY-CARIGNAN, Maria Vittoria Francesca, Princess of.]
Recueil de prières et de pratiques très utils pour se conduire à Dieu...
[Paris, Imprimerie Royale], 1735.
First and only edition of this rare prayerbook, compiled by the notorious gambling house hostess and spy Maria Vittoria Francesca of Savoy-Carignan (1690–1766), elegantly printed in a very limited number at the royal press set up at the Louvre.
£2750
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SBRUGLIO, Riccardo.
Richardi Sbrulii equitis Foroiuliani Cesareiq[ue] poete ad magnificu[m] atq[ue] illustrem Maximilianu[m]...
[Colophon:] Augsburg, Hans von Erfurt, 1519.
First, very rare, edition, of Sbruglio’s Latin poems addressed to Maximilianus Transylvanus, published in the year that Charles V became Holy Roman Emperor. A native of Cividale in northern Italy, Sbruglio (c. 1480 – after 1525) studied and taught at Wittenberg (where the rector compared...
£1800
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SCHEFFER, Johannes Gerhard.
Constantini Opelii de fabrica triremium Meibomiana epistola perbrevis ad amicum.
‘Eleuteropoli’ [Freistadt?], 1672.
First edition of this treatise on the ancient oar-driven warships known as triremes by the noted German philologist and archaeologist Johannes Scheffer (1621–1679), written as a critical response to the De fabrica triremium liber of Marcus Meibom, which had appeared in Amsterdam the previous...
£875
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SCHNEPFF, Dietrich.
Oratio de vita et morte illustrissimae principis ac dominae, D. Dorotheae Ursulae, illustrissimi principis...
Tübingen, Alexander Hock, 1583.
Scarce work issued following the death of Dorothea Ursula von Baden-Durlach (1559–1583), comprising a Latin funeral oration by the Tübingen professor Dietrich Schnepff (1525–1586) and verses in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew by several scholars.
£550
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[SCOTT, Walter, Sir.]
Ivanhoe; A Romance. By “The Author of Waverley,” &c. … In three Volumes … Second Edition.
Edinburgh, [James Ballantyne & Co.] for Archibald Constable & Co., and London, Hurst, Robinson, & Co., 1820.
Stated second edition but in fact a third issue of the first, published on 15 January; the first issue, published on 20 December the previous year, is similarly dated 1820.
£375
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SENECA the Younger, and SENECA the Rhetorician.
L. Annaei Senecae philosophi opera omnia; ex ult. I. Lipsii emendatio: et M. Annaei...
Leiden, [Bonaventure & Abraham] Elzevir, [1639–]1640.
[With:]
GRONOVIUS, Joannes Fredericus. Ad L. & M. Annaeos Senecas notae....First Elzevir edition of the moral works and letters of the philosopher and playwright Lucius Annaeus Seneca, and the surviving Suasoriae and Controversiae of his father, known as Seneca the Rhetorician, along with the Amsterdam reprint of the extensive scholia of Johann Friedrich...
£500
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[SIBYLLINE ORACLES.]
Σιβυλλιακοι χρησμοι hoc est Sibyllina oracula ex vett. codd. aucta, renovate, et notis illustrate...
Paris, [Compagnie du grande navire,] 1607.
Second edition, handsomely printed in three sizes of the Grecs du roi, and illustrated with fine plates of the Sibyls by Mallery.
£1200
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SILIUS ITALICUS, C.; John CAREY, editor.
Punicorum libri XVII, sedulâ recensione accurati [cover: Recensuit et...
London, T. Davison for Rodwell & Martin, J. Booker, Baldwin, Cradock, & Joy, G. & W. Whittaker, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, & Co., T. Cadell,...
First and only ‘Regent’s Classics’ edition of Silius Italicus’s epic poem on the Second Punic War, an attractive copy, uncut in the publisher’s printed boards.
£100
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SIMONETTA, Bonifacio.
De Christiane Fidei et Romanorum Pontificum Persecutionibus.
[(Colophon:) Basel, Nicolaus Kesler, 1509.]
A beautiful copy of the second edition of Simonetta’s principal work, containing an early and intriguing reference to the New World, our copy from the library of Christian VI (1699–1746), King of Denmark and Norway, under whom the kingdom expanded its possessions in the Americas.
£4500
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[SOCIETY OF JESUS.]
Les découvertes d’un bibliophile réduites a leur juste valeur. Avec quelques cas de conscience curieux.
Strasbourg, L.F. Le Roux, [1843].
First edition of this scathing response to Busch’s anti-Jesuit Les découvertes d’un bibliophile, central to the highly polemical ‘affaire du Bibliophile’ which divided Strasbourg in 1843.
£375
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SOPHOCLES.
‘Αι του Σοφοκλεους τραγωδιαι ‘επτα. Sophoclis Tragoediae septem: nova versione donatae...
Eton, Joseph Pote; and sold by C. Bathurst et al, London, 1775.
An attractive Eton-printed edition of Thomas Johnson’s Sophocles. Johnson (d. 1746), was educated at Eton, gaining a scholarship to King’s Cambridge in 1683, and returning to the school as assistant master in 1705, the same year he published his editions of Sophocles’ Ajax and Electra...
£400
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[SOPHOCLES.]
Tragoediae superstites et deperditarum fragmenta ex recensione G. Dindorfii.
Oxford, University Press, 1832.
First Oxford edition of the Sophocles of the precocious Karl Wilhelm Dindorf (1802–1883), first published in Leipzig in 1825. This copy was a graduation present from Charles Old Goodford (1812–1884), assistant master (later Head Master and then provost) at Eton, to Arthur Hobhouse (1818–1904),...
£200
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SOPHOCLES.
Tragoediae Sophoclis quotquot extant carmine Latino redditae Georgio Ratallero … interprete.
Antwerp, Jean Bellère, 1584.
An early seventeenth-century sammelband collecting contrasting classical texts: the tragedies of Sophocles, the civil war horrors of Lucan, and the sharp satires of Juvenal and Persius.
£950
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SOPHOCLES; Adrien TURNÈBE, editor.
Τραγωδιαι. Αιαξ μαστιγοφορος. Ηλεκτρα. Οιδιπους...
Paris, Adrien Turnèbe, 1553 [(colophon:) 24 December 1552].
A wide-margined copy of Sophocles in Greek owned by the Vatican librarian and Greek scholar Leone Allacci, with his name on the title-page. Sophocles’ seven tragedies narrate the stories of the Greek heroes and heroines Ajax, Heracles and Deianeira, Oedipus and Jocasta, Philoctetes, Antigone,...
£1850
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SPATARI, Pellegrino.
Le orationi delle Messe di tutto l’anno, tradutte da Don Pellegrino Spathari canonico di Capodistria. Con...
Pesaro, Bartolomeo Cesano, 1555.
Rare first edition of this Italian translation of Latin prayers from the Missal by Spatari, a priest from Capodistria (modern-day Koper in Slovenia), dedicated to Vittoria Farnese, Duchess of Urbino (1519–1602).
£650