Continental

Contact Alex Day, Andrea Mazzocchi, Jonathan Harrison, Charlotte Miller or Sally Deegan

Our Continental department specialises in incunabula, Greek and Latin classics, early vernacular imprints, and notable texts from the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the early modern era, with a specific section devoted to medieval manuscripts, fragments, and illuminations.

We regularly issue lists and catalogues, offering a wide variety of literary, historical, and philosophical books printed in Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, the Low Countries, Eastern Europe, and Russia.  Woodcuts, early engravings, notable bindings, notable marginalia, rare manuscript or printed survivals, and books with a remarkable provenance are among our keenest interests and feature regularly in our stock.

 
  1. RUSCELLI, Girolamo.

    Le imprese illustri con espositioni, et discorsi …

    [(Colophon:) Venice, Comin da Trino di Monferrato, 1572.]

    Second edition of one of the finest emblem books of the sixteenth century, illustrated with over one hundred engravings depicting the imprese of notable figures in Italy and beyond, our copy bound for Giacomo Boncompagni, illegitimate son of Pope Gregory XIII.

    £2750

  2. SALLUST.

    C. Sallustius Crispus cum veterum Historicorum fragmentis.

    Leiden, ex officina Elzeviriana, 1634.

    The first small format Elzevir printing of Sallust with a contemporary ink sketch of a Peeping Tom at the rear of the volume. The volume contains the two major works of Sallust, the Jugurthine War and the Conspiracy of Catiline, along with the surviving fragments of his annalistic history of his...

    £950

  3. SALLUST.

    Caii Sallustii Crispi quae extant.

    London, James Tonson and John Watts, 1713.

    First Maittaire edition. The French-born classical scholar Michel Maittaire (1668–1741) studied at Westminster, and then under Robert South at Christ Church, Oxford. He is best known for his Annales Typographici and the series of duodecimo classics that he published with Tonson and Watts...

    £300

  4. ‘SANCTA CLARA, Abraham a’, i.e. Johann Ulrich MEGERLE.

    Coraggio e viltà, l’uno nella virtù, l’altra nel vizio....

    Trento, Giovanni Parone, 1717.

    Scarce first and only Italian edition of Abraham a Sancta Clara’s emblematic moral treatise Huy! und Pfuy! der Welt, printed in Trento with one hundred striking – albeit somewhat provincial – woodcuts after the engravings in the first German edition of 1707.

    £2250

  5. [SARPI, Paolo (pseud.).] ‘Pietro Soave POLANO’. 

    Historia del Concilio Tridentino di Pietro Soave Polano.  Seconda...

    Geneva, Pierre Aubert, 1629. 

    Second edition, the first to omit the extraneous additions of the 1619 edition introduced by Marco Antonio de Dominis, of the influential and groundbreaking history of the Council of Trent by Paolo Sarpi (1552–1623), described by Milton as ‘the great unmasker’. 

    £450

  6. [SAVONAROLA, Girolamo.] Ambrogio Caterino POLITI.

    Discorso … contra la dottrina, et le profetie di Fra Girolamo Savonarola.

    Venice, Giolito, 1548.

    First edition of a condemnation of Savonarola’s theology, doctrine and prophecies by the former Savonarola acolyte Politi (1484–1553), ‘one of the most fiery Catholic polemicists of his times’ (Bongi, trans.), who four years earlier had published a confutation of Luther’s theology.

    £1500

  7. SBRUGLIO, Riccardo. 

    Richardi Sbrulii equitis Foroiuliani Cesareiq[ue] poete ad magnificu[m] atq[ue] illustrem Maximilianu[m]...

    [Colophon:] Augsburg, Hans von Erfurt, 1519.

    First, very rare, edition, of Sbruglio’s Latin poems addressed to Maximilianus Transylvanus, published in the year that Charles V became Holy Roman Emperor.  A native of Cividale in northern Italy, Sbruglio (c. 1480 – after 1525) studied and taught at Wittenberg (where the rector compared...

    £1800

  8. SCHEFFER, Johannes Gerhard. 

    Constantini Opelii de fabrica triremium Meibomiana epistola perbrevis ad amicum. 

    ‘Eleuteropoli’ [Freistadt?], 1672. 

    First edition of this treatise on the ancient oar-driven warships known as triremes by the noted German philologist and archaeologist Johannes Scheffer (1621–1679), written as a critical response to the De fabrica triremium liber of Marcus Meibom, which had appeared in Amsterdam the previous...

    £875

  9. [SCOTT, Walter, Sir.]

    Ivanhoe; A Romance. By “The Author of Waverley,” &c. … In three Volumes … Second Edition.

    Edinburgh, [James Ballantyne & Co.] for Archibald Constable & Co., and London, Hurst, Robinson, & Co., 1820.

    Stated second edition but in fact a third issue of the first, published on 15 January; the first issue, published on 20 December the previous year, is similarly dated 1820.

    £375

  10. SENECA the Younger, and SENECA the Rhetorician.

    L. Annaei Senecae philosophi opera omnia; ex ult. I. Lipsii emendatio: et M. Annaei...

    Leiden, [Bonaventure & Abraham] Elzevir, [1639–]1640.
    [With:] 
    GRONOVIUS, Joannes Fredericus. Ad L. & M. Annaeos Senecas notae....

    First Elzevir edition of the moral works and letters of the philosopher and playwright Lucius Annaeus Seneca, and the surviving Suasoriae and Controversiae of his father, known as Seneca the Rhetorician, along with the Amsterdam reprint of the extensive scholia of Johann Friedrich...

    £500

  11. [SIBYLLINE ORACLES.]

    Σιβυλλιακοι χρησμοι hoc est Sibyllina oracula ex vett. codd. aucta, renovate, et notis illustrate...

    Paris, [Compagnie du grande navire,] 1607.

    Second edition, handsomely printed in three sizes of the Grecs du roi, and illustrated with fine plates of the Sibyls by Mallery.

    £1200

  12. SILIUS ITALICUS, C.; John CAREY, editor.

    Punicorum libri XVII, sedulâ recensione accurati [cover: Recensuit et...

    London, T. Davison for Rodwell & Martin, J. Booker, Baldwin, Cradock, & Joy, G. & W. Whittaker, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, & Co., T. Cadell,...

    First and only ‘Regent’s Classics’ edition of Silius Italicus’s epic poem on the Second Punic War, an attractive copy, uncut in the publisher’s printed boards.

    £100

  13. SIMONETTA, Bonifacio.

    De Christiane Fidei et Romanorum Pontificum Persecutionibus.

    [(Colophon:) Basel, Nicolaus Kesler, 1509.]

    A beautiful copy of the second edition of Simonetta’s principal work, containing an early and intriguing reference to the New World, our copy from the library of Christian VI (1699–1746), King of Denmark and Norway, under whom the kingdom expanded its possessions in the Americas.

    £4500

  14. [SOCIETY OF JESUS.] 

    Les découvertes d’un bibliophile réduites a leur juste valeur.  Avec quelques cas de conscience curieux. 

    Strasbourg, L.F.  Le Roux, [1843]. 

    First edition of this scathing response to Busch’s anti-Jesuit Les découvertes d’un bibliophile, central to the highly polemical ‘affaire du Bibliophile’ which divided Strasbourg in 1843. 

    £375

  15. SOPHOCLES.

    Σοφοκλεους τραγωδιαι επτα μετα σχολιων παλαιων και πανυ ωφελιμων....

    [(Colophon:) Frankfurt am Main, Peter Braubach], 1544.

    First of several Braubach editions of the seven extant Greek tragedies of Sophocles, this copy with annotations in two different hands, spanning two centuries. The text follows the first Giunta edition published at Florence in 1522 under the editorship of Antonio Francini, with the text of the...

    £2000

  16. SOPHOCLES.

    ‘Αι του Σοφοκλεους τραγωδιαι ‘επτα. Sophoclis Tragoediae septem: nova versione donatae...

    Eton, Joseph Pote; and sold by C. Bathurst et al, London, 1775.

    An attractive Eton-printed edition of Thomas Johnson’s Sophocles. Johnson (d. 1746), was educated at Eton, gaining a scholarship to King’s Cambridge in 1683, and returning to the school as assistant master in 1705, the same year he published his editions of Sophocles’ Ajax and Electra...

    £400

  17. [SOPHOCLES.]

    Tragoediae superstites et deperditarum fragmenta ex recensione G. Dindorfii.

    Oxford, University Press, 1832.

    First Oxford edition of the Sophocles of the precocious Karl Wilhelm Dindorf (1802–1883), first published in Leipzig in 1825. This copy was a graduation present from Charles Old Goodford (1812–1884), assistant master (later Head Master and then provost) at Eton, to Arthur Hobhouse (1818–1904),...

    £200

  18. SOPHOCLES. 

    Tragoediae Sophoclis quotquot extant carmine Latino redditae Georgio Ratallero … interprete.

    Antwerp, Jean Bellère, 1584.

    An early seventeenth-century sammelband collecting contrasting classical texts: the tragedies of Sophocles, the civil war horrors of Lucan, and the sharp satires of Juvenal and Persius.

    £950

  19. SOPHOCLES; Adrien TURNÈBE, editor.

    Τραγωδιαι. Αιαξ μαστιγοφορος. Ηλεκτρα. Οιδιπους...

    Paris, Adrien Turnèbe, 1553 [(colophon:) 24 December 1552]. [issued with:] TRICLINIUS, Demetrius. Εις τα του σοφοκλεους...

    A wide-margined copy of Sophocles in Greek owned by the Vatican librarian and Greek scholar Leone Allacci, with his name on the title-page.

    £1850

  20. SPATARI, Pellegrino.

    Le orationi delle Messe di tutto l’anno, tradutte da Don Pellegrino Spathari canonico di Capodistria. Con...

    Pesaro, Bartolomeo Cesano, 1555.

    Rare first edition of this Italian translation of Latin prayers from the Missal by Spatari, a priest from Capodistria (modern-day Koper in Slovenia), dedicated to Vittoria Farnese, Duchess of Urbino (1519–1602).

    £650