Rare books from Asher Rare Books

39, [1 blank] pp. plus plates.Rare first edition, in German and French, of a great coloured print series, with a 39-page letterpress text, showing horses in a wide variety of colours and patterns by Johann Elias Ridinger (1698-1767), a German painter, graphic artist and engraver of animals, most famous for his horses: "one of the most beautiful illustrated animal books of the 18th century ... lavishly illustrated and also very rare" (Dejager). Together with the book we offer Ridinger's fine original pen and ink, ink wash and chalk drawing for the second plate. While many books or print series on horses show them standing or occasionally running in a race, most portraits in the present series show them much more naturally: stamping or pawing the ground, rearing up, jumping, kicking, sitting and rolling on the ground. When they do stand still they are often turning their heads.With significant tears in 2 plates, unobtrusively repaired without loss, but otherwise in good condition, with minor, mostly… Read More

[4], XIV, [1], [1 blank], 20, 56, 40, 88, [4]; 82, 224, [4]; [10] pp.First edition of a magnificent show-piece displaying the recently discovered antiquities of Mexico, especially those of the Mayan city of Palenque, based on the expeditions of Captain Guillermo Dupaix in the years 1805 to 1807 and illustrated with 162 lithographic plates (including the frontispiece), mostly tinted or beautifully hand-coloured. Some copies were issued with the plates uncoloured and many with them partly coloured, but only a few with the splendid and extensive colouring shown here. The extraordinary illustrations, nearly all drawn by José Luciano Castañeda, who accompanied Dupaix on all three voyages, gave Europeans their first good look at Mayan civilization. They also show many buildings and artefacts that have since been lost or damaged (soon after the expeditions Mexico sank into turmoil and revolution for three quarters of a century). In addition to Palenque, the book covers the Zapotec/Mixtec site Mitla in… Read More

Extremely rare Covens & Mortier edition of De Wit's Atlas maior, here with the engraved allegorical title-page and all 76 maps and their decorations beautifully coloured by a contemporary hand. It combines maps originally issued by Frederick de Wit, with ones from Nicolaes Visscher II and others. De Wit and Visscher were the leading map and atlas publishers in the Netherlands after a fire crippled the Blaeu firm in 1672. De Wit is known especially for the beautiful pictorial decorations on his maps. Only one other copy is recorded in the literature, at the Depôt de Marine in Paris.The atlas opens with Carel Allard's ca. 1696 world map in 2 hemispheres. Among the other maps are 6 of the continents; Nicholas Sanson's map of the poles; 2 maps nominally of the Ottoman Empire but including besides the entire Arabian peninsula, also most of Iran and either the entire Mediterranean Sea (Visscher) or its eastern part (Jaillot); Homann's map of Iran; De l'Isle's map of India, Southeast Asia and the East… Read More

Frontispiece plus [2], 26 ll., including 2 double and 1 larger folding.Splendid vellum manuscript on the condition and organisation of the French Royal Navy of King Louis XV in the year 1732, including maritime data on the French colonies in Canada, Louisiana and the West Indies. The manuscript is beautifully calligraphed in a formal roman and italic in brown-black, red and blue, sometimes with gold covering the ink, with 2 decorated initials in gold over red. The use of the high quality vellum, the fine gouache illustration, the lavishly executed calligraphy and the beautiful contemporary binding, indicate that the manuscript must have been produced for an important person, probably a head of the marine or an official at the court. The manuscript gives a complete survey of the size and organisation of the French navy of the Ancien Regime in 1732 and must have been top secret at the time!From the library of the well-known art historian and book collector Henri Beraldi (1849-1931). The manuscript is… Read More

5 engraved titles, 2 engraved ll. with explanatory text, and 4 engraved and 4 letterpres pp.Fine set of the rarest of great French gardening books by Pierre Panseron (ca. 1736-1787), a well-known Paris architect and Royal engraver. The Recueil de jardinage is divided into many smaller parts, which were also sold separately. Panseron had studied with the great French architect Jacques François Blondel and had been building inspector for the Prince de Conti and professor of drawing at the Royal Military Academy before he settled at Paris as a private tutor of architecture and drawing. He published a number of architectural and gardening atlases, whose full catalogues are added to volume four, both in letterpress and on engraved leaves. All plates were designed and engraved by Panseron. The plates of the present works are printed on strong paper with slightly bluish cast, some of it by Arthaud in Auvergne. They present a rich and wonderful survey of garden landscaping, art and architecture in France in… Read More

Characteristic original watercolour botanical drawing by Johanna Helena Herolt (1668-1728), the eldest daughter of Maria Sibylla Merian and Johann Andreas Graff. It shows a wallflower (Cheiranthus cheiri) and double hyacinth (Hyacinthus orientalis) with two inchworm moths (Geometriae) in the air, two inchworms and two pupae. She probably drew it in Amsterdam around 1700. Though she still remains in the shadow of her mother, she was a fine flower and insect artist in her own right and there is growing appreciation of her work. Her watercolours, more baroque than her mother's and often with brighter colours, radiate vigour and vivacity: the flowers, painted with intensity in every detail, really come to life. Reitsma, p. 135, notes that the prices for the flower watercolours increased with the number of insects, so the present watercolour must have been unusually expensive.Characteristic watercolour in fine state of preservation. Herolt herself may have revised the upper part of the hyacinth.l Cf.… Read More

A fine impression of one of Rembrandt's most famous prints, "Abraham's sacrifice", illustrating Genesis 22: 10-12, where Abraham, after god ordered him to sacrifice his only son Isaac, raises his knife to do so but is stayed by an angel who reveals that it was only a test of his obedience to god. In the Bible, the angel merely speaks to Abraham, but Rembrandt made the scene much more intimate, with the angel reaching around Abraham from behind almost in an embrace, holding his left arm (with the knife), just above the elbow and his right arm (holding Isaac's head) near the wrist. The Dutch States Bible of 1637 does place the angel behind Abraham, but still only speaking to him. Rembrandt made the etching in 1655 and no variant states are known. It differs greatly from his 1635 painting of the same subject, where the figures are not so closely united and neither Abraham nor the angel expresses such tenderness. The present example of the etching retains the finest lines very clearly (for example, in… Read More

[8], 82, [1], [1 blank] pp.First edition of one of the main sources for authentic information on central Africa. Filippo Pigafetta, a relative of Antonio Pigafetta, Magellan's companion on his first circumnavigation of the world, based his work on the information he collected from the Portuguese traveller Duarte Lopez, who sailed to the Congo in 1578 and stayed in Loanda until 1587. Pigafetta's important and beautifully illustrated account deals with the geography of the country, its animals, the inhabitants and their customs, the Portuguese trade, missionary activities, etc. Of special interest are his history and descriptions of Congolese tribes and their kings. It remained the main source for information on the Congo and central Africa up to the middle of the 19th century. The fine and decorative map of Africa includes the Red Sea and parts of the Arabian Peninsula.With the maps repaired and mounted on cloth, and a tear repaired in 1 folding plate, slightly foxed, margins of the plates frayed… Read More

[4], XLI, 558, [2]; [4], 481, [1]; [4], 510, [2]; [4], 480; [4] pp.First edition of an important account of the circumnavigation of the world under command of Cyrille Pierre Théodore Laplace (1793-1875). In May 1829 Laplace was appointed commander of the ship La Favorite, to make a journey around the world for scientific and commercial purposes. He departed from Toulon, followed the coast lines of Africa past the Cape Good Hope and visited Pondichéry, Madras and Surabaya. He explored the coasts of Cochinchina and Tonkin and set sail to the Philippines and after that Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand. He crossed the Pacific on his return to Toulon, past Valparaiso, Cape Horn and the coasts of Brazil. On 20 April 1832 he touched ground in Toulon again. The journey was a considerable success and added many important details to the scientific knowledge of the areas explored.Some small tears, a few slight stains in the views volume. Very good set.l Borba de Moraes I, pp. 457-458; Ferguson 1669; Hill… Read More

Ten first (1599-1668) and three later (1634-1638) editions forming the complete works of Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605), an Italian botanist, pharmacologist and a professor of botany at the university of Bologna. This massive encyclopaedia, most volumes published posthumously, was based on natural history specimens and drawings in Aldrovandi's own museum in Bologna. Already in the 1570s he welcomed visitors from near and far to his museum and at his death in 1605 he left it to the city of Bologna, making it the first institutional herbarium.Aldrovandi, hailed as the "Pliny of his time", was the author of several encyclopaedic works on natural history, the Opera being his most extensive work and also the largest collection of natural history illustrations published before the 18th century. Many of the illustrations in these 13 volumes are the work of Jacopo Ligozzi. The original drawings are still in Bologna and have been made available online. The Aldrovandi herbarium was the biggest of the 16th… Read More

[4], 90, VI, [2] pp.First and only edition of a superb work, the finest work on falconry that has ever been produced both on account of the beauty of the plates and general accuracy of the text. The lifesize illustrations of the birds are by far the finest ever produced in any book on falconry. “It is impossible to describe the mellowness and beauty of the colourings” (Schwerdt). This famous book on falconry by H. Schlegel and A.H. Verster van Wulverhorst is known chiefly for its lifesize coloured illustrations of birds of prey, lithographs after watercolours by Josef Wolf. The extensive research in the literature and the description of procedures by two laymen in the field of falconry still cause amazement among falconers.The work contains 17 illustrations: successively the tinted title-page, two coloured plates with hunting gear and falconer's equipment, two tinted plates of pictures of the activities of the Loo Hawking Club (not present) and 12 coloured plates with images of birds of prey in… Read More

[452] ll.The Opera omnia of Angelo Poliziano (1454-1494), one of the great Florentine humanists and tutor to Lorenzo de 'Medici's children, printed by the most famous printer and publisher of its time: Aldus Manutius at Venice. According to Renouard, the great bibliographer of the Aldine editions, this rare edition is "l'une des plus belles qui soient sorties de l'imprimerie Aldine".The publication of the Opera omnia of Poliziano has a complex history. It has been usual to regard the edition as part of some 'grand design' of humanist publication: apart from Aldus' admiration for Poliziano as the embodiment of that perfect philological skill to which he himself aspired, we might notice that the book was printed as a large folio, costing 1.4 ducats and demanding typographic experiments such as the first use of Hebrew letters (Lowry).Indeed Poliziano was the outstanding humanist of his day, a talented scholar whose breadth of reading was very great and whose range of interests included history,… Read More

48; [14], [2 blank] pp.Extremely rare German account of Captain Cook’s death, published in Tallinn in Estonia, "undoubtedly the first account of Cook's death to be published in book form" (Beddie), together with a letter concerning the 1775 Spanish voyage to the west coast of North America by Bodega y Quadra (1744-1794), also in German, with many references to Cook. The first work opens with a short poem on the death of the English navigator and hydrographer James Cook (1728-1779), who died during a scuffle with the Hawaiian natives on 14 February 1779, after his relations with them had deteriorated. It is followed by a foreword and "a short account of Cook's life, his voyages and his death, with many inaccuracies on his early career" (Beddie), also in German. Much of the information in this small booklet comes from a letter, Auszug des Briefes von Kensington den 4ten Febr. 1780 die Nachrichten von Kapitain Cook betressend.This letter "includes paraphrases of passages in Captain Charles Clerke's… Read More

Extremely rare series of 18 beautiful hand-coloured lithographs showing stage designs for the Real Teatro San Carlo, one of Italy's most famous opera houses. The striking plates include scenery for Zelmira (1822), the acclaimed opera by Rossini, who was the artistic director of the San Carlo from 1815 to 1822. Each lithograph has a hand-written caption and is dedicated to Maria Cristina Ferdinanda di Borbone, principessa delle Due Sicilie (1806-1878).Pasquale Canna was a distinguished, prolific, neo-classical stage designer who made a career as a painter and scenographer in Parma, Venice, Milan and Naples, working for such famous theatres as La Scala (Milan), the San Carlo and the Teatro del Fondo (Naples). The present brightly coloured plates are an impressive visual record of the eventful history of the San Carlo, published during the great age of Neapolitan opera. Some spotting, some insignificant waterstains, front inner hinge cracked, binding slightly chafed, otherwise in very good condition.l… Read More

[10], 466, [6] ll.The first English edition of Ludovico di Varthema’s famous account of his travels to Arabia, Persia and India: a highly important and adventurous narrative, first published in Italian as Itinerario … nello Egypto, nella Suria nella Arabia deserta & felice … in 1510, here published in English with other accounts of travels in exotic lands. All of the early Italian editions of Varthema's Itinerario, separately published, are extremely rare. Varthema, a gentleman adventurer and soldier from Bologna, left Venice at the end of 1502 for the Middle East. Impressed and fascinated, he describes not only rites and rituals, but also social, geographical, and day-to-day details. "I determined, personally, and with my own eyes", he declares in the prefatory dedication, "to ascertain the situation of places, the qualities of peoples ... of Egypt, Syria, Arabia Deserta and Felix, Persia, India, and Ethiopia, remembering well that the testimony of one eye-witness is worth more than ten… Read More