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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.

 
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  1. LACTANTIUS.

    Opera.

    [Venice,] Vindelinus de Spira, 1472.

    Magnificent incunable edition of the works of Lactantius, a fine product of the first Venetian press, established in 1469 by Johannes de Spira and continued by his brother Vindelinus from 1470 until 1473. This was the fifth impression of the works of Lactantius, the hugely successful North African...

    £25000

  2. GIBBON, Edward.

    The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

    London, W. Strahan & T. Cadell, 1776–88.

    First editions of all six volumes of Gibbon’s ‘masterpiece of historical penetration and literary style’ (PMM). The first volume here is of the second variant (of two), with the errata corrected as far as p. 183 and X4 and a4 so signed. The first edition of volume I (1000 copies, published...

    £14000

  3. MACROBIUS, Ambrosius Theodosius.

    Somnium Scipionis ex Ciceronis libro De republica excerptum; Macrobii … primi diei Saturnaliorum...

    Venice, Filippo Pinzi, 29 October 1500.

    Sixth and last incunable edition of Macrobius, illustrated with a world map, with extensive early marginalia.

    £9500

  4. POCOCKE, Richard. 

    A Description of the East, and some other Countries.  London: W. Bowyer for the Author, [‘and sold by J. and...

    [Nourse, and J. Rivington’ (I)], 1743–1745. 

    First edition, demy folio issue. A successful churchman Pococke (1704-1765) is now best remembered as a traveller and mountaineer. His earliest journeys were undertaken between 1733 and 1736 through continental Europe. His ‘next and most ambitious journey, from 1737 to 1740, was to the Near...

    £8000

  5. DASSIER, Jean and Jacques-Antoine. 

    ‘An Explanation of Dassier’s Medals being a Representation of a Series of Events taken...

    London, c. 1795–1800. 

    An exceptionally fine illustrated manuscript, with drawings after the series of sixty medals of Roman history from Romulus to the Age of Augustus produced by Jean Dassier and his son in 1740-1743.  The drawings are executed with considerable finesse, adding detailed elements not clearly visible...

    £6500

  6. HOMER.

    Ομηρου Ιλιας και Οδυσσεια μετα της εξηγησιος. Homeri Ilias et Ulyssea cum interpretatione...

    Basel, Johann Herwagen, 1535.

    First Herwagen edition of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, with the scholia of Didymus, edited, according to Dibdin, by the great German classicist Joachim Camerarius (1500–1574), with interesting near-contemporary annotations by a student of Greek, likely drawn from Thomas Grynaeus’s lectures in...

    £6000

  7. OVIDIUS Naso, Publius, and Pedro Sánchez de VIANA, translator and commentator. 

    Las transformaciones. 

    Valladolid, Diego Fernández de Córdoba, 1589.

    First edition, a copy of notable provenance, of perhaps the most successful early Spanish translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, by Pedro Sánchez de Viana (c. 1545–1619), a physician by training, published along with his substantial commentary. 

    £6000

  8. ERASMUS, Desiderius.

    Collectanea adagiorum.

    [(Colophon:) Strasbourg, Matthias Schürer, 1519.]

    Intensely annotated copy of a lifetime edition of Erasmus’ repository of Greek and Latin proverbs. The first version of the Adagia, containing about eight hundred maxims, had been published in 1500. Erasmus continued to add to his thesaurus for over thirty years, the success of this...

    £5850

  9. MARLIANI, Bartolomeo. 

    Urbis Romae topographia. 

    Rome, Valerio & Luigi Dorico, September 1544. 

    First illustrated edition (third overall), showing the archaeology and antiquities of Rome as known in the sixteenth century.  First published in octavo by Antonio Blado in 1534 and reprinted at Lyons by Sébastien Gryphe later the same year, Marliani’s topography of Rome remained the foremost...

    £5500

  10. EUSTRATIUS of Nicaea, et al.

    Ευστρατιου και αλλων τινων επισημων υπομνηματα εις...

    [(Colophon:) Venice, heirs of Aldus Manutius and Andrea Torresano, July 1536.]

    Editio princeps of the Greek commentaries on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics by Eustratius of Nicaea, Michael of Ephesus, the Peripatetic philosopher Aspasius, and other anonymous scholiasts, published by the Aldine press, annotated by a contemporary scholar.

    £5500

  11. PINDAR.

    Ολγμπια Νεμεα Πγθια Ισθμια … Olympia, Nemea, Pythia, Isthmia. Una cum Latina omnium versione carmine...

    Oxford, E Teatro Sheldoniano, 1698 … London, apud. Sam. Smith & Benj. Walford.

    First edition thus, the variant with the title-page dated 1698 rather than 1697. The Greek text was edited by Richard West and Robert Welsted, and the chronology of the Olympiads provided by the Bishop of Lichfield. 

    £5250

  12. FULBECKE, William.

    An Historicall Collection of the continuall Factions, Tumults, and Massacres of the Romans and Italians during...

    London, Printed for William Ponsonby. 1601.

    First edition. Fulbecke’s Historicall Collection ‘was a narrative history of the last years of the Roman republic and it is significant as one of the very few attempts by a Renaissance Englishman to write such a work … An interesting attempt to weave together such often-contradictory...

    £5250

  13. EPIPHANIUS.

    Κατα αιρεσεων ογδοηκοτα το επικληθεν Παναριον … Contra octoginta haereses...

    Basel, [Johann Herwagen, 1544].

    Editio princeps of the Greek text of Epiphanius’s great compendium of heresies, in a particularly attractive and well-preserved contemporary pigskin binding.

    £5000

  14. SENECA, Lucius Annaeus.

    L. Annei Senecae opera, et ad dicendi facultatem, et ad bene vivendu[m] utilissima, per Des. Erasmum Roterod....

    Basel, ‘in officina Frobeniana’, 1529 [(colophon:) Basel, Johann Herwagen, March 1537].

    Second Erasmus edition of the moral essays and letters of Seneca, owned and annotated by Ludovicus Carinus (d. 1569), friend and later foe of Erasmus himself.

    £5000

  15. JUVENAL, Decimus Junius.

    Argumenta Satyrarum Iuvenalis per Antonimu [sic] Mancinellum. Cu[m] quattuor co[m]me[n]tariis … Sebastianus...

    [(Colophon:) Milan, Giovanni Angelo Scinzenzeler for Giovanni da Legnano, 17 August 1501.]

    Rare edition of Juvenal’s Satires with commentary by the Italian humanists Antonio Mancinelli, Domizio Calderini, Giorgio Merula, and Giorgio Valla, edited by the Greek scholar Sebastianus Ducius, with extensive early annotations and corrections to both the text and commentary.

    £5000

  16. PLINY the Elder. 

    Historia mundi, multo quam antehac unquam prodiit emaculatius [...] annotationibus eruditorum hominum...

    Basel, Johann Froben, March 1525. 

    First Froben edition of Pliny’s encyclopaedia, with a prologue by Erasmus and Hermolaus Barbarus’s commentary, given to Erasmus’s correspondent Bartholomaeus Latomus by his student and future patron, Johann Ludwig von Hagen. 

    £4800

  17. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA (Titus Flavius CLEMENS). 

    Omnia opera. 

    Paris, Sebastien Nivelle, 1572. 

    A thoroughly annotated copy of this early edition of the complete works of Clement of Alexandria, in the Latin translation of Gentian Hervet.  Clement lived and wrote in the second and third centuries, one of the most important interpreters of Christianity within an established Greek philosophical...

    £4750

  18. PLUTARCH.

    The Lives of the noble Grecians and Romanes, compared together by that grave learned Philosopher and Historiographer,...

    Imprinted at London by Richard Field for Bonham Norton, 1595.

    Second edition of North’s celebrated translation of Plutarch, first published in 1579, which has long been recognized as a major source for Shakespeare, providing not only the historical framework for Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Anthony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus, but ‘long...

    £4500

  19. LIVY, Titus. 

    T. Livii Patauini […] ex XIIII Decadibus Historiae Romanae ab Urbe condita, Decades, prima, tertia, quarta,...

    Paris, [Michel Vascosan for] Oudin Petit, 1543 [– Michel Vascosan for himself and Oudin Petit, 1542]. 

    A much-praised edition of Livy’s History, reprinting Vascosan’s 1535 edition and including the philological corpus on Livy by the most established humanists of the time: Rhenanus, Gelenius, Grynaeus, Glareanus, Badius Ascensius, Valla, and Sabellico. 

    £3800

  20. JUSTINUS, Marcus Junianius, and Lucius FLORUS. 

    [Epitome historiarum:] Justini historici clarissimi in Trogi Pompei historias...

    [Venice, Bartolomeo Zani, 3 February 1503]. 

    A thoroughly annotated copy of a greatly influential compendium of Trogus’s monumental forty-four-book Historia of the world from Babylon to the Augustan era. 

    £3800