The Eighteenth Century
Audouin, François Xavier. Du commerce maritime, de son influence sur la richesse et la force des états, démontrée par l’histoire des nations anciennes et modernes; situation actuelle des puissances de l’Europe, considérées dans leurs rapports avec la France et l’Angleterre; réflections sur l’armement en course, sa législation et ses avantages. Paris: Paris, Baudouin, an IX [1801]. $200
8vo (21 cm); 2 vols. [4], 280, [2]; [4], 258, [4] pages. Half titles present. Bound in contemporary half heep over marbled paper-covered boards. Red and green labels on spine. Few contemporary annotations in margins in ink. Rubbed at edges, but clean, sound and entire. Cf. Goldsmiths’-Kress library of economic literature ; no. 18002.1.
Not found in bibliographies of Americana, yet text includes extensive comment on the American War of Independence and on the Compagnie des Indes.
Explaining Italy to England
Baretti, Giuseppe (1719-1789); Samuel Johnson. An Introduction to the Italian Language Containing specimens both of prose and verse ... with a literal translation and grammatical notes, for the use of those who, being already acquainted with grammar, attempt to learn it without a master ... London: for A. Millar, 1755. $900
First edition. Octavo (21 cm); xi, 467 pages. Bound in contemporary speckled calf, double gilt fillet on covers and on each side of the five raised spine bands; two old paper spine labels, one with title in manuscript. Corners very slightly bruised; upper cover and spine extremities rubbed. Manuscript table of contents in contemporary hand on lower free endleaf, and a few textual annotations in ink and pencil in two hands. Broughton Baptist Library bookplate.
References: Courtney, p. 73; Chapman & Hazen, p. 139.
The cultural bosses in Milan, Turin and Venice made certain Giuseppe Baretti would never work in Italy after he published a merciless satire of one of their rank. Consequently Baretti moved to London (1751) where he became something of a professional Italian, translating, teaching, writing about and promoting Italian culture. He was welcomed into the circles of Samuel Johnson and Henry Thrale and, was a frequent guest at Streatham Park. (Later, when Baretti was tried for murder after stabbing a pimp to death, Johnson testified as a character witness, and Baretti was acquitted.) Here, in the same year that Johnson published his great dictionary, Baretti issued this selection of passages from 37 celebrated Italian authors with facing translations in English (including Castiglione, Machiavelli, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Tasso, Michelangelo, Petrarcae, and others, some of them unknown in English before). Baretti went so far as to translate a few of Milton's sonnets into Italian, probably at Johnson's suggestion. Johnson is credited with writing a portion of the Preface, and two extensive footnotes.
Explaining America to France
Crèvecoeur, J Hector St John de. Voyage dans la haute Pensylvanie et dans l'état de New-York : par un membre adoptif de la nation Onéida . Paris: Maradan, 1801. $1,500
First Edition. 20cm; 3 volumes. Complete including half-titles, 11 engraved plates and maps (some folding) and 5 tables (3 folding). Frontispiece portrait of George Washington. Portraits of Onandaga and Oneida leaders. Scenes of the Hudson Valley and Niagara Falls. References: Sabin 17501 ("much information and personal gossip not readily found elsewhere.... No other writer has so well described the Indian great councils"); Howes C-884; Siebert Sale 216.
A French immigrant to the United States, Crevecoeur effectively defined the emerging American national character in his Letters of an American Farmer (1791; we know of no earlier or more elegant formulation of the 'melting pot' theory). He returned to France in the 1790s and published there this three-volume account of the United States. The lively and enjoyable text describes amazing landscapes, records conversations with remarkable Americans, seeks to understand historical events, and penetrates deeply into the civilization of Northeast American Indian nations. Contemporary tree calf with leather labels, rubbed at extremities. Old ownership stamp on half titles. A very good set.
Strawberry Hill
Lucan; Hugo Grotius; Richard Bentley. M. Annaei Lucani Pharsalia cum notis Hugoni Grotii et Richardi Bentleii. [Twickenham]: Strawberry Hill, 1760. $500
First state. Quarto (29cm); 3 preliminary leaves, 525 pages. Engraved allegorical device on title page. Bound in recent 1/4 morocco over crushed morocco boards in period style. Occasional moderate foxing; pages evenly toned. Some offsetting of engraved image onto first text page. Eighteenth-century armorial bookplate pasted to front blank. References: Hazen, 7 ("This volume is perhaps the most distinguished piece of printing to come from the Press at Strawberry Hill"); Dobson, 306.
Ancestor of the Private Press movement that flourished in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Strawberry Hill Press was Horace Walpole's hobby. The leap from book-collector to manufacturer of fine limited editions was a stroke of genius that still rings in the book world. The Strawberry Hill edition of Lucan arrived after a period of stress, when Walpole was hiring and losing printers in rapid succession. After the struggle, the finished product pleased him, and he thought it "a handsome edition." The text is based on notes left by the classical scholar Richard Bentley, whose son had been a friend of Walpole's until they quarreled. Where Bentley's unfinished notes left off, those of Hugo Grotius were supplied. Richard Cumberland edited the text.
Dr. Maihows. Voyage en France, en Italie et aux isles de l'archipel, ou Lettres écrites de plusieurs endroits de l'Europe et du Levant en 1750; avec des observations de l'Auteur sur les diverses productions de la nature & de l'Art. Paris: Charpentier, 1763. $350First edition. 12mo (18 cm); 4 volumes in two. Bound in contemorary mottled calf, tooled in gilt on spine. Marbled endleaves. Leather title labels absent from first volume. Wear to extremities, with some loss at crown of second volume, yet handsome. Light dampstains pervade volume 1.
He Built an Asylum in Haiti
Moreau de Saint-Méry, M.L.E. (Médéric Louis Elie), 1750-1819. Éloges de M. Turc de Castelveyre, et de M. Dolioules, fondateurs des deux hospices appelés maisons de providence, au Cap-Français, isle Saint-Domingue. Paris: G. A. Rochette, 1790. $1,200
First edition. 20cm; 40 pages. Half title present. Paper slightly toned, with few spots or blemishes. Bound in 20th-century marbled boards with leather label on spine. Martin & Walter, Révolution française, 25156; Bissainthe, Bib. haitienne, 7027. Not in Sabin, Lande, Gagnon.
First biography of Louis Turc de Castelveyre, known as Frere Chretien (1687-1755), founder in 1735 of "La Providence," a large asylum and orphanage at Cap-Français in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Cap-Haitien, Haiti). Brother Chretien had gone to Montreal from France in 1719, and within five years he became administrator of the Hôpital Général. After unfortunate administrative gambles, Brother Chretien and the institution in his charge sank into debt, which chased him out of Montreal and through France to Saint-Domingue. Turc intended to start a brewery at Cap-Français to pay off his creditors, but he opened his house first to orphans and then to the elderly and infirm. He raised funds for the incipient asylum and eventually received government funding. The subject of the second sketch in the book, Dolioules, founded a school for girls in Cap-Français.
Ovidius Naso, P.; Girolamo Pompei (1731-1788). L'epistole d'Ovidio volgarizzate. Bassano: Remondini, 1785. $200
Octavo (22 cm); xxviii, 410 pages, and engraved frontispiece of the poet, book and muses. Engraved device on title page, engraved ornaments throughout. Text in Italian and Latin. Bound in contemporary vellum over boards, with title hand-tooled in gilt directly on spine, rupturing the vellum along the edge of the gilt ornament. Later owner's ink stamp on preliminary blanks and title page. Very few spots or blemishes in text.
Translation (with original Latin text) of Ovid's Heroides by the 18th-century poet from Verona. Pompei wrote lyrics, tragedies, literary and philosophical essays, and is best remembered for his translations of Plutarch, Ovid and other classical texts. Heroides is Ovid's book of imaginary letters of complaint from the mistreated women of classical mythology addressed to their heroic husbands and lovers, who have abandoned them or misused them. With this book of fictional epistles, Ovid invented a completely new literary mode, never seen before in Classical literature.
Piozzi, Hester Lynch Thrale (1741-1821) and others. The Florence Miscellany. Florence: Printed for G. Cam, 1785. $8,500
First edition, presentation copy. Octavo (21 cm); 224 pages, including three pages of engraved music. Manuscript leaf in Piozzi's hand bound in. Bound in contemporary English tree calf, gilt, covers with an outer border of Greek key pattern between gilt fillets and framing an interlaced gilt inner border with tooled corner ornaments of flowers, board edges, turn-ins, and text block edges gilt; marlbed endleaves; expertly rebacked with wriginal backstrip laid down, corners repaired. Some very minor foxing. Manuscript alterations (by Piozzi) on pages 62, 209, 215. Censored lines on pages 9, and 27 left blank, but small pasted slip corrects text on page 20. Nineteenth-century bookplate of Walter Hamilton; penciled note of Pickering & Chatto on lower endleaf dated 1937.
Reference: Rothschild 1437; Maggs catalogue 1083, #398 (this copy).
Presentation copy from Hester Lynch Piozzi to her friend and correspondent, the Cambridge professor of Arabic Leonard Chappelow, with his signature on the title page and note on the front fly-leaf, "Given to me by my Good Friend Mrs. Piozzi April 1787." Opposite Mrs. Piozzi's "Translation of an Italian Sonnet upon and English Watch," is inserted an AUTOGRAPH TRANSCRIPT of the original Italian poem in Piozzi's hand. The typographical error in the printed text annoyed her, as she wrote to Lysons from Rome in March, 1786, "They have printed it 'touched by a magic hand.' It should be 'wand,' for 'hand' comes in the line that rhymes to it." Here, she crossed out "hand" and wrote "wand" in black ink.
The collection was a collaboration between four English ex-pats (Piozzi, William Parsons, Robert Merry and Bertie Greatheed) and their Italian friends, among them Piozzi husband (who contributed a musical serenade), Lorenzo Pignotti, Angelo d'Elci, Marco Lastri and Giuseppe Parini. Their idea was to reinvigorate poetry by injecting Italian poetic traditions into English letters. In addition to original poems, the volume notably translates selections from Petrarch, Dante, Tasso and Poliziano into English, as well as contemporary political odes and panegyrics to Italian patriots.
The collection was written off as unserious by contemporary critics (in part due to it Piozzi's preface, which presents it as light amusement), yet it was the first important English engagement with Italian poetry after Milton, and it led English Romantics into Italian territory. The authors shared copies from the paltry print run between themselves and sent out copies to their friends.
Ricardo, David (1772-1823).On the principles of political economy, and taxation. London: John Murray, 1817. $14,000
First edition 23cm; viii, 589, [14] pages. P7 and P8 appear to be cancels. Errata on verso of last text page. Bound in later 19th-century half burgundy morocco over marbled boards, with original label. Binding worn and scuffed, with rebuilt corners, reinforced edges, and repaired joints and hinges. Title page somewhat dusty with some marginal notations in ink. Ghosts of old cello-tape repairs (cello tape removed) in early pages and on end leaves. Ownership stamp of Samuel M. Levin. Preserved in custom-made clamshell case with leather label titled in gilt. References: PMM 277; Kress B 7029.
Ricardo's groundbreaking theory of value and distribution. "Ricardo was in a sense the first 'scientific' economist.... [He] saw the study of economics as a pure science whose abstractions were capable of quasi-mathematical proof" (Printing and the Mind of Man, 277).
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Lettres Ècrites de la Montagne. Amsterdam: Marc Michel Rey [but pirated], 1765. $150
12mo (17 cm); 2 parts in one volume: vi, 231, [3 blank]; [2], 153, [1] pages. Bound in half calf over boards, worn and scuffed, yet strong and entire. Pages evenly toned, with some light foxing present. See Dufour, 237.
One of about five pirated editions of Rousseau's letters on political philosophy, first published by Rey in December 1764 and widely plundered by unscrupulous publishers in the ensuing year.
[Terray, Joseph Marie (1715-1778)]; [Mathieu François Pidanzat de Mairobert (1727-1779)]. Lettre de M Terray, excontroleur général, a M Turgot Ministre des finances. Pour servir de supplement a la correspondance entre le S. Sorhouet et M. de Maupeou Manuscript on paper. [Paris]: ca. 1775. $850
12 x 19 cm; 44 numbered pages, last blank. Each page with double-ruled border in ink. Sewn into plain wraps, titled in ink on upper wrap "Lettre de M. Terray, Cont.eur Général." Lower corner of fore-edge scalloped away from last twenty leaves, minimally affecting text. Impressed with a tax stamp for paper ("quittance des roles des tailles") twice on lower wrap.
Manuscript copy in secretarial hand of text published surreptitiously as a pamphlet "a Londres" (but in Paris?) in 1775. Purporting to be letter from the outgoing Comptroller-General of Finance to his replacement, it is a fierce satire on the entire system of taxation and debt management during the reign of Louis XV. As finance minister, Terray restructured the national debt by suspending payments on the interest on government bonds, levying forced loans, and by simply repudiating what was owed. When Louis XVI succeeded his grandfather in 1774, Terray and his patron Maupeou were dismissed from government. In addition to the pamphlet bearing the London imprint, the text appears printed in several other contexts (Terray's Mémoires by Coquereau, for instance). The subtitle indicates that the text supplements a pamphlet by Pidanzat de Mairobert which treats the same theme and events. Mairobert's Mémoires secrets pour servir à l'histoire de la République..., emanated in manuscript from Paris prior to publication in London, and although this text does not appear in that collection, it may have been disseminated in a similar fashion.
Valli family of Cortona. Ricordi di casa. [Cortona]: 1765-1804. $800
Manuscript on paper. 28 cm; 100 leaves. Bound in 1/4 vellum over paste paper and titled in manuscript on upper panel. Binding cracked and frayed. First 45 leaves in hand of Giovanni Francesco Maria Petrucci; latter leaves in several hands.
A family book recording land transactions, testaments and property transfers among the Valli family of Villa Vaglie, in the center of Cortona, Italy. The secretary, Giovanni Petrucci, copied out the initial leaves in 1765, faithfully reproducing testaments, acquisitions and sales arching back to 1703. The book continues in Petrucci's hand until 1773, followed by less professional scribes until the closing entry, dated 1804. The entries are rich with proper names and extensive details of family relationships. While most entries regard property or real estate, there are excursions into the reflective mode (in the context of testaments). In all, the text provides a vivid account of the land holding society of Cortona in the 18th century, and of their commercial relations.
