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  1. LONG, Charles Chaillé.

    Central Africa: naked truths of naked people. An account of expeditions to the Lake Victoria Nyanza and...

    New York, Harper & Brothers, 1877.

    First American edition recounting Charles Chaillé Long’s expedition from south Sudan through Uganda to Lake Victoria, featuring one of the great subtitles of nineteenth-century exploration literature.

    £100

  2. LLOYD, Albert Bushnell.

    In dwarf land and cannibal country: a record of travel and discovery in Central Africa.

    London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1900.

    First edition, second impression, of a travel narrative by the Anglican missionary Albert Bushnell Lloyd (1871-1946), recounting his adventures and missionary work in Uganda. A member of the Church Missionary Society, Lloyd was sent to Uganda to preach the Gospel to its unfortunate inhabitants in 1894....

    £50

  3. HARRIS, William Cornwall.

    The wild sports of southern Africa; being the narrative of a hunting expedition from the Cape of Good...

    London, Henry G. Bohn, 1852.

    Fifth edition, with beautiful hand-coloured lithographic plates, recounting the author’s hunting expedition through southern Africa between 1836 and 1837: a ‘well-known and valuable work’ (Mendelssohn). ‘Harris journeyed to the Meritsane River where he encountered a herd of quaggas and brindled...

    £275

  4. DENHAM, Dixon, Hugh CLAPPERTON, and Walter OUDNEY.

    Narrative of travels and discoveries in northern and central Africa, in the...

    London, John Murray, 1828.

    Third edition recounting the attempt of Dixon Denham (1786-1828), Hugh Clapperton (1788-1827) and Dr Walter Oudney (1790-1824) to trace the course of the Niger river. With previous attempts to trace the Niger having ended in disaster, Denham, Clapperton and Oudney were dispatched on an expedition in...

    £250

  5. CRANWORTH, Bertram Francis Gurdon, Baron.

    Profit and sport in British East Africa. Being a second edition, revised and enlarged,...

    London, Macmillan and Co., 1919.

    Second edition, revised and enlarged from the first, of Lord Cranworth’s description of British East Africa, a protectorate territory largely equivalent to modern-day Kenya. Cranworth, a soldier who fought and was wounded in the Boer War, devotes chapters to the history, the climate, the demographics,...

    £50

  6. CHEESMAN, Robert Ernest.

    Lake Tana and the Blue Nile. An Abyssinian quest.

    London, Macmillan and Co., 1936.

    First edition recounting various expeditions around Lake Tana by major Robert Ernest Cheesman (1878-1962), the consul for north-west Ethiopia between 1925 and 1934. It may be said with more than a little confidence that the appointment of Cheesman (an experienced traveller and author of the 1926 travel...

    £100

  7. FOREST, BISSON FRERES, &c

    A collection of eight albumen prints (or salt and albumen collages) from mammoth-plate negatives...

    France, 1864-5.

    An exceptional series of oversize prints commissioned by the Compagnie de Chemins de Fer de l‘Ouest to commemorate the construction of a series of new bridges completed 1861–1864, including the metal bridge at Orival, later destroyed in the Franco-Prussian War, and the oblique stone bridge of...

    £30000

  8. ROUQUET, Jean-André. 

    The present State of the Arts in England.  By M. Rouquet, member of the Royal Academy of Painting and...

    London, for J. Nourse, 1755. 

    First edition in English, published in the same year as the French original, from the library of the great Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith (1723–1790). 

    £19500

  9. STEPNIAK, Sergey. 

    דאָס אינטערערדישע רוסלאַנד … איבערזעצט פון א. פרומקין
    [Dos...

    New York, Maks N. Maisel, 1921. 

    Scarce first American edition in Yiddish of Stepniak’s first and most influential book.  Written in Italian during exile in Switzerland following his assassination of Nikolai Mezentsov, chief of Alexander II’s secret police, Underground Russia was published in 1882 and translated into...

    £150

  10. FENTON, Roger.

    Lichfield Cathedral, south transept portal and steps.

    1858.

    A fine print of one of Fenton's most striking architectural photographs, the details of the stonework given human scale, and a touch of mystery, with the figure posed half-in and half-out of the doorway. It was one of a number of images of Lichfield which 'from a restricted distance, move around the...

    £12500

  11. [MALTA.] 

    Eruditissima istoria dell’assedio fatto dalli Turchi all città di Malta. 

    Naples, [c. 1800?]. 

    Scarce poem on the 1565 Great Siege of Malta, when around 2400 Knights Hospitallers and Maltese inhabitants repelled an Ottoman invasion lead by Dragut and Mustafa Pasha.  Library catalogues credit the work to Innico Grivaccio. 

    £650

  12. WILSON, David (editor).

    A Collection of Psalm and Hymn Tunes, &c. in three Parts … 

    [Edinburgh:] Sold by the Editor at his House … and by J. Hamilton, Music Seller … [c.1800?].

    Second(?), expanded edition of this collection of (mostly) hymn tunes scored for treble, tenor, and bass. Though for most hymns the tunes only are printed, there are words for Cowper’s ‘Hark, my Soul!’ and one other, and at the end are the words and tunes for seven secular catches (in three...

    £500

  13. SWIFT, Jonathan. 

    A Tale of a Tub … to which is added, an Account of a Battle between the antient and modern Books in St. James’s...

    London, C. Bathurst, 1751. 

    A scarce later edition of Swift’s classic satires on corruption in religion and learning, as exemplified in the conduct of Peter (Roman Catholicism), Martin (Luther), and Jack (Calvin) in the Tale of the Tub, and the spirited fight over the highest peak of Parnassus in the Battel of...

    £175

  14. FAGNANI, Giovanni Marco. 

    De bello Arriano libri sex. 

    Milan, heirs of Pacifico da Ponte and Giovanni Battista Piccaglia, 1604. 

    First and only edition of the sole published work by the Italian nobleman Giovanni Marco Fagnani (1524–1609), an epic poem recounting Ambrose of Milan’s campaign against local Arians in late fourth-century Lombardy. 

    £900

  15. GIRALDI, Lilio Gregorio. 

    De Deis gentium varia et multiplex historia, in qua simul de eorum imaginibus et cognominibus agitur,...

    Basel, Oporinus, 1548. 

    First edition of the most important mythography to be published after Boccaccio’s Genealogiae deorum gentilium and before Conti’s Mythologiae, with extensive marginalia in the first part. 

    £2500

  16. URCEO, Antonio [or Codro]. 

    Hoc Codri volumine haec continentur.  Orationes, seu sermones ut ipse appellabat.  Epistolae. ...

    Bologna, Giovanni Antonio Benedetti, 7 March 1502. 

    First edition of a quintessential piece of Italian humanism, annotated by a sixteenth-century reader particularly interested in the philology of the texts. 

    £3000

  17. [POUND.] 

    Ezra Pound at Seventy.

    [New York, New Directions, 1955.] 

    A small celebratory booklet printing tributes by Auden, Cummings, Eliot, Hemingway (‘Will gladly pay tribute to Ezra but what I would like to do is get him the hell out of St. Elizabeth’s’), Archibald Macleish, Jose de Pina Martins, Marianne Moore, Norman Pearson, Spender, and Edith Sitwell.

    £30

  18. MYERS, Robin, Michael HARRIS, and Giles MANDELBROTE (eds).

    Lives in Book History: Changing Contours of Research over...

    Leicester, Garendon Press, 2022.

    ‘This volume has grown out of one event in a long series of annual conferences on book-trade history – held to mark the fortieth conference in 2018. For this we had asked nine well-known book historians to give a retrospective review of their field, be it manuscripts, incunabula, book binding, and...

    £35

  19. [DENNIS, John, and George DUCKETT?]

    Pope Alexander’s Supremacy and Infallibility examin’d, and the Errors of Scriblerus...

    London, J. Roberts, 1729.

    First edition, very scarce in commerce, of an exhilaratingly spiteful attack on Pope in the wake of the publication of the Dunciad variorum, comprising seven different satirical texts, three in verse, issued in quarto to match ‘the least pompous Edition of the Dunciad’.

    £3250

  20. [AUGUSTINE, Saint, attributed author.]

    The Meditations of Saint Augustine, from the Latin Original. By the Rev. J. Martin,...

    Dublin: Printed for the Author, by H. Fitzpatrick … 1798.

    First edition of this rare translation of the pseudo-Augustinian Meditationum Liber, an eleventh-century devotional text very popular in the Middle Ages.

    £1250