Foreign Literature
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This department specialises in rare and important works of French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish and South American literature from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.
Here you can find first editions and signed or presentation copies of authors as diverse as Akhmatova, Balzac, Borges, Camus, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Goethe, Goldoni, Hugo, Kafka, Leopardi, Lorca, Manzoni, Pirandello, Pushkin, Schiller, Tolstoy, Zola, and many others. Among the important works which have passed through our hands are the original working manuscript of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, now in the Pushkin House in St Petersburg, the only known copy of the first edition of Brecht's first play, Baal (1920) with his working notes, and an extraordinary collection of Pushkin first editions.
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ARIOSTO, Ludovico.
Orlando furioso.
Birmingham, John Baskerville for Pietro Molini and Giovanni Molini, 1773.
A handsomely bound set of the attractive and influential Baskerville edition of Orlando furioso, illustrated with plates by notable eighteenth-century artists, and with an extensive list of prominent subscribers.
£1850
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ARMINESI, Rocco degli.
Attila flagelum Dei, tradotto dalla vera cronica per Rocco degli Arminesi padovano. Ove si narra come detto...
Venice, Omobon Bettanino, [mid-eighteenth century].
Very rare eighteenth-century edition of a popular and best-selling poem on Attila the Hun.
£600
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ARNIGIO, Bartolomeo.
Rime dell’Arnigio per la ill[ustre] signora Claudia Martinenga.
Brescia, Giovanni Battista Bozzola, 1566.
First edition of Bartolomeo Arnigio’s collection of poems addressed to Claudia Martinengo, wife to Ludovico Martinengo della Pallata, an important association copy presented by the author to fellow poet Antonio Beffa Negrini.
£1750
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BARTOLI, Adolfo.
Scenari inediti della Commedia dell’arte. Contributo alla storia del teatro popolare italiano.
Florence, Sansoni, 1880.
Rare first edition, one of only 350 copies, of a foundational source for the study of Commedia dell’Arte. The exceptionally well-loved and widely-performed form of drama is the subject of the author’s pioneering study: he examines tropes, characters, plots, structures and lines of ‘scenarios’...
£500
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BEISNER, Monika.
Dante Alighieri: La Commedia in 100 tavole.
Turin, Attini, 2021.
Limited edition, one of 500 numbered sets, of Monika Beisner’s one hundred illustrations of the Divine Comedy, each accompanying one canto, conveying with remarkable fidelity the vivacity of Dante’s verse.
£50
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BIZZARRI, Pietro.
Petri Bizzari varia opuscula, quorum indicem sequens pagina demonstrabit.
Venice, [Paolo Manuzio], 1565.
First edition of a collection of treatises, verses, and declamations in the classical style by the Italian Protestant scholar and spy Pietro Bizzarri, including two works dedicated respectively to Queen Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots; with contemporary English provenance and manuscript corrections.
£2500
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[CARDUCCI, Giosuè, Olindo GUERRINI, et al., editors.]
...
Bologna, 19 April [– 29 June] 1874.
Very rare complete run of this short-lived satirical magazine against the pro-government newspaper Il Monitore, produced by a group of young liberals from Bologna including the poets Giosuè Carducci and Olindo Guerrini.
£1000
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DELL’UVA, Benedetto.
Le vergini prudenti.
Florence, Bartolomeo Sermartelli, 1582.
First editions of three religious poems in ottava rima by the Capuan monk Benedetto dell’Uva, representative of Counter-Reformation poetry in southern Italy.
£650
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FAGNANI, Giovanni Marco.
De bello Arriano libri sex.
Milan, heirs of Pacifico da Ponte and Giovanni Battista Piccaglia, 1604.
First and only edition of the sole published work by the Italian nobleman Giovanni Marco Fagnani (1524–1609), an epic poem recounting Ambrose of Milan’s campaign against local Arians in late fourth-century Lombardy.
£900
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GAROFANI, Antonio Maria.
L’Hippocreivaga musa invocatoria.
Ferrara, Vittorio Baldini, 1580 [(colophon:) 1581].
First editions of three poetical works printed in Ferrara, Florence, and Pistoia, the first two rare examples of poesia fidenziana, a genre of Italian satirical poetry particular to the mid-sixteenth century, and the third work a seemingly unrecorded piece of poesia bernesca and one of...
£1750
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[GIRALDI, Giovanni Battista.]
Giuditio sopra la tragedia di Canace et Macareo con molte utili considerationi circa l’arte tragica,...
(Colophon:) Lucca, Vincenzo Busdraghi, 4 May 1550.
First edition of this criticism, in the form of a dialogue, of Speroni’s play Canace et Macareo, which sparked one of the most remarkable literary debates of the time. The text was previously attributed to Bartolomeo Cavalcanti, but the authorship of Giraldi is now generally accepted. The full...
£650
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GOLDONI, Carlo.
Scelta di alcune commedie. Per uso de’ dilettanti della lingua italiana. Prima edizione italiana.
Livorno, Assunto Barbani, 1816.
First edition printed in Italy of a collection of ten comedies by Goldoni, selected for their lack of complicated syntax and lack of Venetian dialect and idioms, published in Livorno for the benefit of the English community.
£175
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[GUARINI, Giovanni Battista.]
Il Pastor Fido.
‘In Parigi, appresso Tomaso Iolly, 1706’.
Scarce Parisian edition of Guarini’s immensely popular ‘pastoral tragi-comedy’, charmingly illustrated by Antonio Luciani.
£175
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[JUVENILIA.]
Racconti per gli adolescenti. Con tavole miniate.
Trieste, ‘Sezione Letterario-Artistica del Lloyd Austriaco’, 1857.
First and only edition, extremely rare, of these cautionary tales for adolescents, featuring inter alia debates among children on the ethics of taxidermy, a brawl in Latin lessons, arrests for embezzlement, and the unjust incarceration of a schoolboy.
£350
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LEWIS, Wyndham.
Ezra Pound, un saggio e tre disegni.
Milan, all’insegna del pesce d’oro [Scheiwiller], 1958.
First edition, an hors serie copy (from numbered edition of 1000), a translation by Pound’s daughter, Mary de Rachewiltz, of an essay that first appeared in Pound’s 65th birthday festschrift in 1950; this translation was published in part ‘to celebrate Ezra Pound’s return to Italy’.
£75
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MARCHESE, Annibale.
Poema per la nascita del serenissimo Leopoldo arciduca d’Austria principe delle Asturie dedicato alla augustissima...
Naples, Felice Mosca, 1716.
Rare first edition of this verse encomium to the newborn Leopold, Archduke of Austria, the last direct male descendant of the Habsburg house, who would live only seven months.
£650
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MARINO, Giambattista; Gasparo MURTOLA.
La Murtoleide fischiate del cavalier Marino con la Marineide risate del Murtola.
‘Norinbergh’ [i.e. Venice], Ioseph Stamphier, 1619.
Rare first edition of these Baroque burlesque sonnets presenting both sides of the bitterly satirical literary feud between the leading Italian Baroque poet Giambattista Marino and his adversary, Gasparo Murtola, containing Marino’s celebrated argument that the aim of the poet is to inspire wonder.
£900
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MELECRINIS, Maria Teresa.
Le voci del cuore a Maria Teresa Melecrinis dei baroni di Ioppolo e Coccorino che a di 6 luglio 1846...
Naples, stamperia dell' Iride, 1846.
Very rare collection of odes and sonnets composed to mark the entry of Maria Teresa Melecrinis into the Benedictine monastery of San Paolo at Sorrento.
£175
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MUSESTI, Piero; Giovammaria FEBRARI, translator.
Gesta di Napoleone I. imperator de’ Francesi e re d’Italia scritte...
Brescia, Tipografia dipartimentale, 1805.
Uncommon first and only edition of this dual language panegyric to Napoleon, composed in the wake of his coronation as King of Italy in Milan cathedral in May 1805, a large paper copy in decorative paper, presented by the authors.
£550
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[NAPOLEONIC ITALY.]
Alla società delle gentilissime signore di Moncalieri dilettanti del giuoco del tavolazzo. Sonetto bernesco-morale...
Turin, Giacomo Fea, 1799.
An unrecorded sonnet addressed to the to the female players of tavolazzo – a Piedmontese sport along the lines of target shooting – at the Society of the Gentlewomen of Moncalieri; the rules of the sport would be formally laid out in 1780.
£375