Recent Acquisitions
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[POPE, Walter.]
The Memoires of Monsieur Du Vall: containing the history of his Life and Death. Whereunto are annexed his last...
London, Printed for Henry Brome … 1670.
First(?) edition of a partly fictitious and often satirical life of the highwayman Claude Duval, published shortly after his execution in 1670. This is the more substantial of two opportunistic biographies, between them the main sources of information about him, though by no means entirely trustworthy. ...
£750
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REXROTH, Kenneth.
An Autobiographical Novel …
Garden City, NY, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1966.
First edition, inscribed ‘In friendship / for Geoffrey Bridson / Kenneth Rexroth SF June 66’.
£300
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AIKEN, Conrad.
Ushant, an Essay.
New York & Boston, Duell, Sloan and Pearce / Little, Brown and Company, [1952].
First edition, inscribed ‘For Geoffrey [Bridson] from Conrad. Ex – Xmas 1956’. Ushant, Conrad’s ‘autobiographical narrative’, is often considered his most significant work in prose.
£300
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AIKEN, Conrad.
Thee.
New York, George Braziller, 1967.
First trade edition, inscribed ‘For Geoffrey and Joyce [Bridson] / this little hymn of love / from Conrad / 1968’.
£250
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LINNAEUS, Carl (or von LINNÉ), and James JENKINSON (translator).
A generic and specific Description of...
Ashburner, and Lancaster, A. Ashburner, 1775.
First edition of this provincially printed partial translation of Linnaeus’s Genera plantarum. It precedes both William Withering’s The Botanical Arrangement of all the Vegetables naturally growing in Great Britain (1776), the first such work to be based on Linnaean taxonomy,...
£225
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HUGHES, Langston.
Shakespeare in Harlem.
New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1942.
First edition of this wartime collection of poems, inscribed shortly after Hughes and Bridson met for the first time: ‘For Geoffrey Bridson, with the friendship, and regards of Langston Hughes. New York, January 28, 1944’.
£1000
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LEWIS, Wyndham.
The Revenge for Love.
London, Cassell & Co. Ltd., [1937].
First edition, very scarce in the dust-jacket, of ‘one of Lewis’s finest novels … a brilliant novel of character’ (Bridson, The Filibuster), set in pre-Civil War Spain and centred on an incident of Communist gun-running on the border. ‘Here for once, Communism is accepted as a...
£1250
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[INTERSEX.]
Three pamphlets.
Paris, 1892–1920.
A collection of rare French pamphlets on the subject of differences in sex development from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Two of the three pamphlets are doctoral theses, covering the social impact of differences in sex development, and persistent müllerian duct syndrome (‘tubular...
£450
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DE LUCA, Giovanni Battista.
Il Cardinale della S.R. Chiesa pratico di Gio. Battista de Luca nell’ozio Tusculano della Primavera...
Rome, nella stamperia della Reverenda Camera Apostolica, 1680.
Scarce first edition of this thorough work on the cardinalate by the Italian jurist and cardinal De Luca (1614–1683). De Luca studied and practiced law at Naples before moving to Rome in 1645, where he established his reputation as one of Italy’s pre-eminent jurists and worked closely with...
£300
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SYKES, Arthur Ashley.
The Duty of Love to God, and to our Neighbours. A Sermon preach'd at the Assizes held at Chelmsford in...
London, J. Darby & T. Browne for Chelmsford, Samuel Lobb, 1728.
First and only edition of this sermon given by the latitudinarian and controversialist Arthur Ashley Sykes (c. 1684–1756).
£150
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LEWIS, Wyndham.
Doom of Youth …
London, Chatto & Windus, 1932.
First English edition, one of Lewis’s scarcest works (only 549 copies avoided destruction). Doom of Youth began life as a series of seven articles on youth politics in Time and Tide in June–July 1931, rounded off with a pair by G.K. Chesterton; it was expanded and first published...
£2000
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[DENNIS, John, and George DUCKETT?]
Pope Alexander’s Supremacy and Infallibility examin’d, and the Errors of Scriblerus...
London, J. Roberts, 1729.
First edition, very scarce in commerce, of an exhilaratingly spiteful attack on Pope in the wake of the publication of the Dunciad variorum, comprising seven different satirical texts, three in verse, issued in quarto to match ‘the least pompous Edition of the Dunciad’.
£3250
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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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SMITH, Robert.
The Universal Directory for taking alive and destroying Rats, and all other Kinds of four-footed and winged Vermin,...
London, printed for the author, 1768.
First edition of a guide to catching and killing all manner of crawling and flying vermin, illustrated with plates, by the professional exterminator and rat-catcher Robert Smith.
£500
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[SAINTE-HILAIRE, Émile Marco de.]
Réclamation addressée à S. Ece. Mgr. Delavau, préfet de police, par Modeste Agnès, patentée...
Paris, chez les marchands de nouveautés, 1821.
Rare first edition of this work on Parisian prostitution, attributed to the writer and journalist Émile Marco de Sainte-Hilaire (1796–1887). The Réclamation is presented as a letter from the prostitute Modeste Agnès to the newly-appointed Paris chief of police, Guy Delavau (1787–1874),...
£850
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CAIROL, M. de.
Réflexions historiques et politiques, sur les revolutions qu’a essuyé l’agriculture sous différens gouvernemens,...
Amsterdam and Toulouse, Joseph Robert, 1786.
Very rare essay on the state of agriculture in France, and in particular in the Languedoc, examining the ways in which the policies of various governments (from the Romans and Visigoths onwards) have affected agricultural production, the current situation, and the ways in which matters could be...
£450
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[LAPINI, Bernardo.]
Vita di Madonna Onorata scritta da Bernardo Ilicino publicata per la prima volta sopra un codice del secolo...
Milan, Giuseppe Bernardoni, 1843.
First appearance in print of this life of the Sienese noblewoman Onorata Saracini (née Orsini, 1435–1457), by her contemporary, the late fifteenth-century physician and writer Bernardo Lapini (or Ilicini), here edited by the Milanese print and old master dealer Giuseppe Vallardi (1784–1863)...
£350
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[SEVILLE.]
Mercantile contract between Sebastián de Baeza of Seville and Hernán López de Segovia, almost certainly relating...
Seville, 25 July 1576.
A commercial document from the heyday of Seville’s trade with the Indies. Drawn up for Sebastián de Baeza, a resident of the barrio of San Bartolomé in Seville, the document recapitulates a previous agreement of 25 June 1576 between, on the one hand, Hernán López de Segovia and, on...
£1200
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PALMERSTON, Henry John Temple, third Viscount.
Signed undertaking to procure an Assignment of Term from the Executors of the Will...
22 July 1806.
Document signed by the young Palmerston, arising from the sale of his property at East Sheen, near Mortlake, to Thomas Bernard of Wimpole Street in 1805.
£675
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[BENDISCIOLI, Faustino.]
Quadro ossia saggio epilogato del Sistema di liberta’ proclamato dai Francesi.
Milan, Stamperia [dei Patrioti d’Italia] di Strada Nuova, [1799].
An impassioned tract attacking the claims of a new life of liberty promoted in Europe after the French Revolution, very rarely to be found in any of the three editions published in the same year.
£200