Rare books from White Fox Rare Books and Antiques

Paris. Box. Very Good Plus. A suite of 23 dazzling color plates of Japanese vases produced with a novel "pochoir"-like process around 1840. Each measures 46.5 by 35.5 cm, and in a small cursive handwritten note on the title page, the prints are described as "aquarelles miniatures", which happens to be the term Beauvalet used for his process. Beauvalet published a book in 1835 entitled "Aquarelle-Miniature Perfectionnee reflets metallique et chatoyans et peintre a l'huile sur velous en six leons," and in this book he speaks of a process of mixing watercolors which were to be successively applied to paper in a stencil process -- tantamount to what is now known as pochoir. Whether the procedure described accurately described fully what Beauvalet actually did so that the same effects could be replicated, it is indisputable that Beauvalet managed to achieve an uniquely lustrous effect, with colors and a sheen produced in this and the small body of other works credited to Beauvalet that were unlike… Read More

France. Cloth. Custom clamshell box.. Very Good. No longer must one imagine Paganini, Stockowski, Bernstein or Rachmaninoff insects! Fantastical and fun depiction of a full orchestral band of anthropomorphic insects rendered in an electric riot of colors. N.d., circa late nineteenth century. 12mo. 16 by 12 cm. 65 leaves of original watercolor, pencil and ink illustrations of insects playing all kinds of musical instruments. The anthropormorphism follows in the tradition of Grandville, Varin and other eccentric French illustrators of the nineteenth century, yet whatever debt the artist here might owe to others does not detract from the brash originality of his own conception. And equally important, whether he was a professional artist or intending this work for publication or not, the quality of his execution sets this work apart from a mere amateur effort. One example of the artist's meticulousness is subtle: the careful placement of shadows. The work opens with a depiction of a butterfly… Read More

Nurnberg: Verlag der Johann Andreas Endter. Endterischen Handlung, 1824. Neue Auflage. Half Cloth. Marbled Boards. Custom Cloth Box to house book. Tall folio, 34 by 21 cm. Title, followed by 41 hand-colored plates. This work was originally published in 1689, and there was also an 1812 printing. This copy used the original woodcut plates, and the hand-coloring palette and style is consistent with that of the seventeenth century, lending an antiquarian authenticity to the edition. They are woodcuts by Elias Porzelius, mostly after designs by Susanne Maria Sandrart (1658-1716), the relatively rare known female artist of the time. The plates depict all the stages of life, from birth to death, and many depicting the various professions, including tailor, cobbler, baker, butcher, paper maker, bookbinder, cartwright or barrel-maker, dyer, weaver, stonecutter, coachmaker, house painter, saddler, locksmith, , blacksmith, carpenter, clown, etc. Particularly charming are the plates of acrobats and a… Read More

Tokyo: Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai (The Society for International Cultural Relations), 1937. First edition. Leporello. Hardcover boards, paper pastedown.. Very Good. The Japanese photobook equivalent of a Leni Riefenstahl movie! Deemed "arguably the high point of both the Japanese propaganda and the modernist photo book" by Parr and Badger in "The Photobook: A History". Oblong folio, 27 by 30 cm. 64 pp., or 32 double-page back-to-back photomontages configured as an accordion fold-out, and a deliberate attempt to adapt the traditional Japanese pillow book to a more modern usage. Text (captions) in English, French and German. The photographers involved were also staff photographers of the Japanese photo magazine, "Nippon". The black and white photos have an extraordinary dynamism and three dimensionality achieved by the artful juxtapositions, and there is a cumulative power to the whole enterprise. Just as the photos themselves are able to convey movement, the message of the whole is that Japan itself was… Read More

Burma (Kengtung, Shan State, presumed), 1908. Quarter Morocco, Cloth Boards. Very Good. Oblong 8vo. 18 by 25.5 cm. 60 original watercolors, with 30 in each album. With Shan captions, presumably translated into English which is presented on pastedown sheet on front inside cover. The drawings in both albums were drawn by a Hkon artist of Kengtung according to labels on the front of both. The album creator might have been a man named Richard Phillimore, or something close to that, based on a handwritten inked name which isn't entirely legible. The first volume depicts the struggles against Chinese invaders and the rise and fall of several leaders. About half of the scenes show violence, or armed engagement and/or threat, while the other scenes tend to be more placid, with men shown praying, in meditation, listening, resting. All the pictures have the irresistible charm of folk art. From the text label on the front cover, this is presumably one of two books of scenes, but without that… Read More

London and Edinburgh: John Miller and W. Blackwood. Full Straight-Grained Morocco. Near Fine. A spectacular assemblage of the master caricaturist's oeuvre! Politicians, fashion, actors and opera singers, ladies playing cards, sportsmen (skaters, hunters), connoisseurs and aesthetes, royalty, the rich and the rabble -- nothing was sacred before Gillray's acerbic eye and brush! N.d., 1818. Oblong 4to, 23 by 32.5 cm. 164 pp., plus 85 hand-colored aquatint or engraved plates, four of which are folding. The coloring is throughout rich and bright. No small part of what makes this survey a true treasure are the typically three or four pages (occasionally less, occasionallyl more) of droll commentary that accompany each plate. These short essays provide the context and explain the goings-on in the illustrations, which might have even been sometimes obscure then after the passage of a few years. In doing this, the text aspires to capture some of the Gillray voice but in more than clipped dialogue bubbles. At… Read More

Bruxelles: Les Editions Socialistes. First Edition. Folder. Paper pastedown on a heavy card stock. . Very Good. Signed by the artist on the front cover and dated 1928. (The album may have been issued in 1925, but bears no printed date.) 317 by 243 mm. One leaf, with playful carnivalesque preface by Barbusse on the recto and a key on the verso, with the title or subject of the following 12 pochoir plates rendered in six languages (French, Dutch, German, English, Russian, Italian and Spanish), with some power deriving from the repetitive similarities for the words in the different languages. Each plate an allegorical depiction of an enemy of the working class: militarism, property, philanthropy, social democracy, "justice", colonialism, fascism, "police spy", parliamentarism, "middle-spirit", religion and patriotism. The artwork, a heady mix of Cubist, Constructivist, Futurist and Dada-ist styles, has a sculptural quality, which is no accident given that Deltor eventually gained renown for his… Read More

Amsterdam, 1732 or 1733. The panorama or concertina was made, we believe, in 1732 or 1733, or close to that date. The silver "shraubthaler" or outer casing we assume was made separately, at a later date, but not long afterward.

Amsterdam: Edente Nicolao Iohannis Piscatore. First Edition. Full Vellum. Ribbon ties. . Very Good. One later title bearing the date of 1638; the only copy found on line bearing the primary title is dated 1674. 4to oblong, 30 by 38 cm. Partially hand-colored title page, 206 copper engraved plates (not counting five later title pages) and 101 manuscript leaves. In essence, then, this is two works -- a printed illustrated plate book, and a highly scarce one at that, and a manuscript commentary on the plates. The captions of the printed plates are in Latin, while the manuscript text is in Dutch. The manuscript portion is beautiful, with an abundance of ornate letter devices, virtually one on each manuscript leaf, and the writing besides being rendered generally with a calligraphic hand. These Dutch exegeses are written in a vernacular, non-stilted manner. Not referenced in Brunet, nor Landwehr. We could locate only one copy of the Visscher work on OCLC. It is at the Herzogin Anna Amalia… Read More

Half Morocco, Pebbled Cloth. Very Good. N.d., 1870s or 1880s. English in original. Albums are each 35 by 29 cm. In total, 309 original artworks incorporating monograms, crests and very occasionally other die-cuts, these being the size of typical monograms. Of these 309 separate specimens, we would say that 79, or slightly over 25 percent of them, stand out as extraordinary in some way compared to the more pedestrian monogram and crest album. Into this "extraordinary" category we would hold out as the most special those artworks which tell a story of some kind, such as one illustration in which we see cats tumbling into a tub. In another, manned balloons are flying over a coastal area. Then we include as "extrordinary" the wider category of paintings which have human and/or animal subjects, even if they do not have quite the same narrative thrust to them. To list just a few of these, there is the boy in a turban, the painting of a concubine, a boy with a kite, a painting of a peacock, of a cow, of… Read More

New York City, 1828. Hardcover. Cloth spine. Marbled pastedown on boards. Leather centerpiece label on front board.. Good. Original watercolors of rural Manhattan as it appeared in 1828. Among these, and captioned, are a farmhouse on Broadway and 8th Street; Kips Bay, showing a boy sailing a small craft with a farmhouse in the background; a house in Bloomingdale, the location of an early village now the Upper West Side along the river between 96th and 106th Streets; and a stately mansion surrounded by fields and less important buildings we would conjecture in or around Bloomingdale but captioned, surely incorrectly, the Battery. Most of the paintings are uncaptioned. Of these, some are surely the Upper Hudson area, or are scenes that we can't tell whether they are upstate or in the present day city. The artist also ventured away from the New York areas. Among the non-New York paintings are a depiction of the Cape Pogue Lighthouse on Martha's Vineyard, which still stands; Fowey Harbour, which is… Read More

London: T. Osborne, T. Trye, S. Crowder, H. Woodgate, 1757. Second Edition. Half Morocco. Marbled paper pastedown. . Very Good. First edition, hand-colored version, of this landmark botanical survey. Folio. 42 by 26.5 cm. [2], iv, ii, 714 pp., plus hand-colored frontis and 60 hand-colored numbered plates, with all plates engraved. Note that not all copies of the first edition were hand-colored. With first edition error points in pagination, with following pagination sequence: 591, 584, 595 594, 595, 598, 597, 598 . . . Posthumous work attributed to deceased Hale in part and also attributed to Hill. This copy had belonged to Mario Buatto, the "Prince of Chintz", one of the most famous of New York decorators and also a book collector. Condition: front joint cracked. Spots and other soiling on the leather. Buatto's name and date of acquisition are scrawled in a flair, not so attractively, on FFEP. Leaves with age toning and scattered light foxing. Plates with hand-coloring sometimes faded but usually… Read More

Paris, 1906. Full Morocco. Slipcase with marbled paper pastedown and morocco edges. Dust jacket with morocco spine and morocco edges. . Fine/Fine. Gorgeous illuminated and calligraphic manuscript on vellum leaves, magnificently bound. Supposedly this showcase manuscript was on display at the Exposition Universelle de Bruxelles in 1910! The manuscript is written in French, and based on a Spanish tale. 4to. 29.5 by 22.5 cm. 21 vellum leaves, including blanks, featuring 13 watercolor illustrations, three headings with large decorative initials in red, blue and green, and 69 smaller decorative initials also colored. Additional pictorial architectural title in grisaille, watercolour over pencil with title in gold and "Pour Monsieur Raymond Claude Lafontaine" at foot. Primary title -- some might regard this as the half-title -- has red and black lettering and below appears a vignette of a knight holding a disembodied head. All the watercolor paintings are signed with the artist's initials. Two… Read More

London: Henry Piazza et Cie., for the Fine Art Society, 1905. Limited First Edition. Full Morocco. Cloth Box. . Fine. No. 94 of 300 copies issued. Initials of Fine Art Society on limitation page. 4to. 32.5 by 26.5 cm. 38 color plates. Printing only on rectos, other than the limitation page. After half-title, limitation page, title, two page preface and index, each of the "flowers" has a short text leaf followed by the plate leaf. The illustrations are all round. The flowers serve as an inspiration for artwork that doesn't depict the flowers themselves but notions suggested by the names of the flower. The artwork, as one would expect from a leading Pre-Raphaelite, has a tinge of the Medieval, and certain tenebrous and spiritual moodiness, and the air of rich symbolism. The print process employed was innovative, somewhat akin to a collotype process, with the result coming off almost like pochoir. Text and captions in red and green. Condition: perhaps a light scuff or two on the binding.… Read More

London: E. Jackson and G. Kearsley, 1805. First Edition. Quarter Calf. Cloth slipcase. Very Good. Scarce hand-colored copy of work, two parts bound in one. Oblong, 27 by 34.5 cm. 20 hand-colored etched plates. The prints are inspired by Boswell's "Journal of a Tour in the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson", which originally appeared in 1785. Additional plates include an engraved portrait of Johnson by Thomas Trotter, two hand-colored Cruikshank plates satirizing life in Scotland, and the seven etched plates from "Outlines of the Opposition Collected from the Designs of the Most Capital Jacobin Artists", published by Hannah Humphrey in 1794 -- these plates are not colored. Binding heavily rubbed along edges, with some chipping and loss of paper pastedown. Calf abraded. Title written in ink on front cover. The etched plate series with a fair amount of light foxing.