Science
Contact Andrea Mazzocchi
Science at Quaritch is broadly defined, ranging from medicine, anatomy, pharmacology (including herbals) and natural history to astronomy, physics, chemistry and mathematics.
An interest in the origins of modern chemistry has led to a specialisation in works on alchemy and distillation, and from there we have also branched out into occultism and hermeticism. We have developed an interest in gastronomy and books on nutrition and wine, an area which over the years has become one of our specialities.-
[LOO, Pieter van, (attributed).]
156 watercolours of flowers, plants, and fruits.
[Holland, c. 1760–80].
A truly stunning collection of over 150 original eighteenth-century botanical watercolours, attributed to the noted Dutch botanical artist Pieter van Loo (1731–1784).
£110000
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[BUNBURY, Henry William.] ‘GAMBADO, Geoffrey’.
An Academy for grown Horsemen, containing the completest Instructions for Walking,...
London, W. Dickinson, S. Hooper, and Messrs Robinsons, 1787 [colophon: Mount Vernon (NY), William Edwin Rudge, 1929].
Limited edition, reprinted from the first, numbered 142 of 400 copies. A humorous parody of the manuals on horsemanship so fashionable in the late eighteenth century, Bunbury’s text was published pseudonymously as Geoffrey Gambado but the plates credited to his own name, with reference to the...
£85
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HOPKINS, William.
Address delivered at the Hull Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, September...
London, Taylor & Francis, 1853.
First edition, an 1853 Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science by its President William Hopkins (1793–1866), inscribed by the author and given to his erstwhile student Francis Galton (1822–1911). A mathematician and geologist, Hopkins became President of the British...
£350
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[VACCINATION.]
Agli abitanti del dipartimento dell’Ombrone proclama del Comitato Centrale di Vaccina sedente in Siena. Abitanti...
Siena, Onorato Porri, 1808.
A seemingly unrecorded broadside promoting smallpox vaccination, issued in the short-lived Italian department of Ombrone under the First French Empire by the Central Vaccination Committee in Siena.
£650
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GABARO, Antonio.
Alla pregiatissima Signora Domenica Schiavon Menato nella fausta occasione del suo primo parto, in argomento...
Padua, ‘Nella Tipografia del Seminario’, 1820.
First and only edition, very rare, of a scathing and sexist condemnation of ‘inhuman’ women who do not breastfeed their own children, dedicated to Domenica Schiavon Menato, ‘an example to all women’, on the occasion of the birth of her first child.
£380
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STATUTA COLLEGII DD.
Almae Urbis Medicorum ex antiquis Romanorum Pontificum bullis congesta, & hactenùs per Sedem Apostolicam...
Rome, Printer of the Apostolic Chamber, 1676 [– c.1745].
The very rare enlarged and updated issue of the statutes of the medical faculty of Rome, a very rare and interesting document on its internal organization.
£550
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[CASTILLO Y SORIANO, José del.]
Amor á la creacion. Poesia dedicada á la Sociedad Madrileña Protectora de los Animales y de...
Madrid, Sociedad de Tipógrafos, 1879.
Very rare survival: a poem in twenty-four stanzas each of five lines devoted to the celebration of animals and plants, dedicated to the Madrid Society for the protection of nature, and publicly read by the actress Carolina Civili on the occasion of the May 1879 exhibition of plants and birds....
£375
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L’HÔPITAL, Guillaume François Antoine, marquis de.
Analyse des infiniment petits, pour l’intelligence des lignes...
Paris, François Montalant, 1715.
Second edition (first 1696) of l’Hôpital’s famous Analyse, the first textbook on differential calculus, inspired by the work of Leibniz and the Bernoulli brothers, this copy profusely annotated by an anonymous but proficient eighteenth-century mathematician.
£3500
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BINGLEY, William.
Animal Biography, or authentic Anecdotes of the Lives, Manners, and Economy of the animal Creation, arranged...
London, R. Taylor & Co. for Richard Phillips, 1805.
Third edition of Bingley’s most popular zoological work. First published in 1802, the Animal Biography provides accounts of the form and behaviour of a wide variety of mammals, birds, fish, and insects.
£175
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CUVIER, Georges, and Edward BLYTH (editor).
The animal Kingdom, arranged after its Organization, forming a natural...
London, William S. Orr & Co., 1851.
Third Blyth edition of Cuvier’s Règne animal. A seminal work of natural history and comparative anatomy, the Règne animal was first published in December 1816 and translated into English in parts issued from 1824 to 1835. The work was edited and enlarged in 1840 by the zoologist...
£175
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[BUNBURY, Henry William.] ‘GAMBADO, Geoffrey’.
Annals of Horsemanship, containing Accounts of accidental Experiments and experimental...
London, W. Nicholson for W. Baynes, 1808.
Third edition of Bunbury’s satirical work with humorous etchings. First published in 1791 and often presented as a continuation of Bunbury’s Academy for grown Horsemen (published in 1784 also under the name Gambado), the Annals of Horsemanship is a parody of Arthur Young’s...
£475
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[PHARMACOPOEIA.]
Apparatus medicaminum ad usum nosocomii Ticinensis anno MDCCXC.
Pavia, Joseph Bolzani, [1790].
Very rare first edition of this pharmacopoeia for use at the Ospedale Grande di San Matteo, also known as the Pietà, in Pavia, one of the foremost medical schools in Europe at the time of this publication. Founded in 1449, the Ospedale remained the centre of healthcare in the city for almost...
£750
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CARDINALL, Allan Wolsey.
In Ashanti & beyond. The record of a resident magistrate’s many years in tropical Africa, his arduous...
London, Seeley, Service & Co., 1927.
First edition, a very nice copy, one of a number of books by the colonial administrator in Africa and later governor of the Falkland Islands Sir Allan Wolsey Cardinall (1887-1956) describing his time in the Gold Coast and Ashanti, present-day Ghana.
£60
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LAMB, Sir Horace.
Autograph letter, signed, to Thomas Bromwich.
6 Wilbraham Road, Fallowfield, Manchester, 9 March 1916.
A letter from Sir Horace Lamb (1849–1934) to fellow mathematician Thomas Bromwich. Lamb held the chair of pure mathematics at Owens College, Manchester, from 1885 until 1920. He ‘was a talented and inspiring teacher, whose lectures to generations of mathematics, engineering, and physics students...
£125
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EHRLICH, Paul.
Autograph letter, signed, addressed to ‘herr hospitalmeister’.
[Frankfurt,] ‘Westendstrasse 62’, [no date].
A brief note by the bacteriologist Paul Ehrlich (1854–1915), pioneer of haematology and discoverer of salvarsan, to a local hospital director, regarding notes on the bulletin board.
£750
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LIEBIG, Justus von.
Autograph letter to the publishers Heinrich Ludwig Brönner.
Darmstadt, 16 September 1847.
Letter from the German chemist Justus von Liebig (1803–1873) to H. L. Brönner, the Frankfurt publishers and booksellers named after their eighteenth-century founder.
£750
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VISSCHER, Nicolaes [I].
Avium vivae et artificiosissimae delineationes.
Amsterdam, Nicolaus [I] Visscher, 1659.
First and only edition of this rare set of ornithological prints by the famed cartographer Nicolaes Visscher I.
£3750
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[ARISTOTLE – ELIAS.]
Biblioteca Armeno-Georgica. I. Commentarii in Aristotelis Categorias Eliae commentatori adscripti versio...
St Petersburg, Academiae Imperialis Scientarum, 1911.
Uncommon edition, published by the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg, of the Armenian translation of the commentaries on Aristotle’s Categories by the sixth-century Christian philosopher and commentator Elias.
£250
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[CHOLERA.]
Bitte wegen der Cholera, welche bei den Gottesdiensten in das Schluβ-Gebet aufzunehmen ist.
[Württemberg: s.n., 11 October 1831].
Cholera, the ‘plague’ of the nineteenth century, affected large parts of populations across Eurasia and can be counted as one of the most devastating types of epidemics until today. The second pandemic of c. 1826 to 1841 swept from Mecca via Egypt to Europe, and reached Central Europe, and thence...
£175
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[ANATOMY.]
‘Breve compendio anatomico’.
[Italy, c. 1720.]
A handsome set of apparently unpublished notes on orthopaedics by an anonymous medical student, compiled in Italy in the early eighteenth century, covering bones, cartilage, ligaments and muscles. The manuscript opens with a detailed analysis of the human skeleton, its bones and articulation,...
£1750