First and only edition of a great illustrated work of the nineteenth-century European entomology. Devoted to the butterflies and moths of Europe, Praun's work has a layered publication story: it began publication in fascicles in 1858 and grew into a substantial large-quarto undertaking comprising 42 parts, 166 finely colored plates, and representations and descriptions of more than 2,300 species. Publication extended over more than a decade, with the individual taxonomic families also offered separately by the publisher as self-contained units, accounting for the complex sectional organization of surviving sets and the present six-volume arrangement. A complementary work devoted to the caterpillars, revised and completed after Praun's death by Ernst Hofmann, eventually followed separately in 1874-75; the appearance of "Schmetterlinge u. Raupen" on the present title page, suggests that the caterpillars had already been envisaged within the broader scope of the project. Combining encyclopedic scholarship with sumptuous illustration, Praun conceived the work as a practical reference for identifying and comparing butterflies and moths. Working as both compiler and systematist, he drew upon an extensive network of collectors and correspondents, acknowledging among his collaborators Freiherr von Welser zu Neuhof and the schoolmaster Fehr of Gunzenhausen. In his preface, dated Nuremberg, November 1857, Praun laments that the study of butterflies and moths still remained too much the province of amateurs because reliable illustrated references were either incomplete, prohibitively expensive, or difficult to use. His ambition was to produce a comprehensive, systematic, and accessible iconography of the European Lepidoptera. The publishing history, preserved in the successive title pages, traces the project through the Nuremberg firm of Julius Merz, Ludwig Korn, and Emil Küster between 1859 and 1869, year of Praun's death.

First edition of Kern's important illustrated German treatise on the practical art of gauging wine casks, a remarkable vernacular work bringing geometry directly into commerce and the wine trade. With provenance from the Library of Owen Gingerich. Completed on 1 April 1531, Kern himself announces its novelty on the title-page, claiming that it is never before printed or issued (dergleichen noch nie getruckt oder außgangen). A wine cask became a commercial object only after its capacity had been determined, and this Visierbuch (gauging book) addresses precisely the practical art by which an irregular barrel could be measured with a graduated Visierrute (gauging rod) and converted into local units of capacity. Written in Early New High German, with Latin mathematical headings, the work identifies its author in both the dedication and closing verses as Ulrich Kern von Freysing, Rechenmeyster und teutscher schreiber (Ulrich Kern of Freising, reckoning-master and German scribe). The dedication to the merchant Hans Volmar of Rottweil reveals the intended audience: merchants, coopers, and tax officials whose livelihood depended upon accurate measurement rather than abstract mathematics. Kern also acknowledges his teacher, Christoff Rudolff of Jauer, author of the first German algebra book and commonly credited with introducing the radical sign, placing the work firmly within the Rechenmeister (reckoning-master) tradition. The printer's family name will not pass unnoticed by any scholar or lover of early printing. Peter Schöffer the Younger was the son of the celebrated Mainz printer Peter Schöffer the Elder, Gutenberg's apprentice and collaborator; he was also the grandson of Johann Fust, Gutenberg's primary financier. The younger Schöffer carried this remarkable printing dynasty into the Reformation era, working successively in Mainz, Worms, Strasbourg, Basel, and Venice. This volume was printed during Schöffer's Strasbourg partnership with Johann Schwintzer, at a moment when practical mathematical knowledge previously transmitted through local teaching and workshop practice was increasingly finding durable printed form. Kern's insistence on adapting the measuring rod to the different weights and measures of individual regions makes the book particularly revealing of the problem it sought to solve: applying a common geometrical method across a commercial world still governed by highly local systems of capacity. The large woodcut printer's device on the colophon leaf is notable in its own right. Signed with the monogram "HG" and traditionally attributed to Hans Baldung Grien, it is Schöffer's elaborate 1531 device, incorporating the family arms and flanked by shepherds and a richly dressed couple. Schöffer reused the block in later publications, including the "Rerum musicorum opusculum" printed with Matthias Apiarius in 1535.

The first French-language monograph devoted specifically to the orchid family. Jean-Baptiste Barla, primarily known as a naturalist and mycologist, brought the same exhaustive rigor to this book: each of the sixty-three hand-colored lithographed plates comes with a full citation trail through Linnaeus, Tournefort, Reichenbach fil., Grenier and Godron, and Parlatore, and instead of a vague range map, gives the plant's exact local station and the month it flowers. Barla chose his subject for a reason: as his own preface explains, the Alpes-Maritimes compress an unusual cross-section of Europe's orchid flora into one stretch of coastline and mountains, and nearly every species found across France, Italy, and Germany turns up somewhere within it. Vincent Fossat, Barla's regular collaborator for decades, rendered every species at natural size rather than reducing it to fit the page - not a decorative flourish but the science itself, since distinguishing closely related orchids by variety depended on exactly this kind of precision. This copy carries an authorial presentation at the half-title: the inscription opens with "Hommage" and closes with what reads as Barla's own signature, evidence of a gift copy from the naturalist himself - but the one name that would identify who received it has been erased, leaving only the gesture of the author's gift and not its object. The title page enumerates Barla's long list of appointments and nominations, testifying to his respectability - among them the directorship of the Musée d'Histoire Naturelle de la Ville de Nice. In hindsight, this note is particularly interesting: Barla's collections became foundational to the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle de Nice. He housed the museum of the Niçois naturalist Jean-Baptiste Vérany on his own premises beginning in 1863, and on his death bequeathed his own buildings, collections, and library to the city. Today's museum, with more than a million specimens, grew from the collections assembled by Barla and Vérany together. Nice had become French only eight years before this book appeared, but Barla treats the Alpes-Maritimes as a botanical crossroads rather than a political boundary: Mediterranean and alpine orchids, French and Italian botany, local specimens and an international scientific network, all rendered at natural size across sixty-three hand-colored plates.

Published while the phylloxera crisis was still searching for a solution, this open letter to the Chambre de Commerce de Bordeaux captures one of the defining debates in nineteenth-century viticulture. Rather than advocating a single remedy, Théophile Malvezin surveys the competing scientific and practical responses then under discussion, from American vines and chemical treatments to biological control and legislative action, at a moment when neither the epidemic nor its cure had yet been fully mastered. Addressed to Bordeaux's principal commercial institution, instead of the scientific and botanical community, the pamphlet argues that the destruction of the vineyards was no longer simply an agricultural problem but a matter of regional commerce requiring coordinated public intervention. Malvezin would later become the author of the monumental Histoire du commerce de Bordeaux, making this an early intervention by one of the city's foremost historians of its commercial life. Neal Martin places the work within the Gironde's campaign against what contemporaries called "this horrible plague," noting that the alternatives it discusses were ultimately superseded by grafting onto American rootstocks, together with carbon bisulphide and potassium sulpho-carbonate.

An early German pocket-manual devoted to the fun art of ice skating, in first edition. The book appears at a moment when skating was moving from winter utility into social performance, sport, and literary subject explored by the most renowned writers, like Goethe, who famously enjoyed it very much. The historical study, besides archaeological finds, starts around 800 years ago in Holland, where messengers with iron blades and wooden shoes began gliding across the frozen canals, delivering urgent messages to aristocratic recipients. In the following centuries, ice skating developed first into a pastime of the nobility and later into a popular sport. The first skating clubs were founded in Great Britain in the mid-eighteenth century. While the Nordic peoples, as well as the Frisians and Dutch, remained skilled skaters, this art was largely confined to youth in Germany until it became more popular and a preferred winter pastime. As a work devoted entirely to ice skating, this charming volume speaks to historians of sport, leisure, physical practice, material culture, and German literary life.

A popular eighteenth-century Troyes edition of one of the most influential illustrated books of the late Middle Ages, preserving the Danse Macabre within the celebrated Bibliothèque bleue, the inexpensive chapbook tradition that carried classic texts to a mass readership throughout France. With provenance from the Library of a noble German family. La Danse Macabre (French) originated as late-medieval allegories expressing the universal fragility of life, while criticizing the rich and potent. Evolving from Black Death tragedies and sermons, the earliest artistic examples took the form of elaborate murals in the cemetery of the Church of the Holy Innocents in Paris. Similar paintings popped up across Europe, depicting personified Death leading a chain of people (from popes and kings to peasants and children) toward the grave. When the Paris murals began to decay, publisher Guyot Marchant copied the poetry and commissioned woodcut illustrations, publishing the first definitive printed version, La Danse Macabre in 1485. The motif became one of Europe's enduring visual and literary allegories, reminding readers that death levels every distinction of rank, profession, age, and sex. By the eighteenth century, the work had entered the world of the Bibliothèque bleue: the inexpensive, woodcut-illustrated books printed principally at Troyes and distributed by itinerant colporteurs from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century. In this new setting, a late medieval moral allegory became household reading, devotional literature, and popular picture book at once, its illustrations surviving through generations of reused and recut woodblocks. The title page identifies Jean-Antoine Garnier, active as printer-bookseller at Troyes from 1766, while the privilege printed on p. 76 reproduces the royal privilege granted in 1728 to Pierre Garnier. This juxtaposition is entirely characteristic of the Bibliothèque bleue: privileges, woodcuts, and popular texts alike passed from one generation of the Garnier family to the next, and were routinely reprinted unchanged as editions continued to be issued throughout the eighteenth century. The privilege thus records the continuity of the Troyes press rather than the date of the present impression.

First edition of this rare book, historically significant as a very early Italian publication dedicated to the Tangram, the famous seven-piece Chinese dissection puzzle (the very first book on the subject was published in Italy the previous year). The little volume was published in Milan in the same year as a Florentine edition, which appears to have sepia-toned engraved plates rather than the pastel hand-colored ones found in the present Milan copy. The two editions differ in pagination, as noted by comparison with the digitized Florence copy available online (Internet Archive). The comparison also confirms that the pages headed "Tavola" begin with Tavola V (5): plates 1-4 reproduce the alphabet and therefore do not require explanatory Tavole. In the present copy, the Tavole are bound within the text rather than within the sequence of illustrated plates. In the catalogue entry for the Florentine copy presently offered by Peter Harrington, the Milan edition is described as "surfacing slightly less regularly" than the Florentine one, with the observation that "At auction, Florentine copies have appeared three times (...) and one Milanese is recorded." No priority between the two editions has been established when copies have previously surfaced on the market. The European Tangram craze of the early nineteenth century manifested itself in Italy not only as a passion for the puzzle but also as a vehicle for satire. This figure album turns the seven-piece "Rompicapo" or "Testa-rotta" (Tangram) into a display of chinoiserie, mock erudition, and social comedy. Issued anonymously and commonly attributed to a Roman playwright, it frames the game with a witty discourse on progress, Chinese customs, and European manners, then treats the seven geometric pieces composing the puzzle as an alphabet of comic invention.

First edition of the first published description in French of the profession of silk designer, issued in Paris by Sébastien Jorry, Bauche, and Brocas in 1765. Until then, much of the specialized knowledge of the Lyon silk designer belonged to the workshop rather than the printed page. Joubert, himself a Lyon silk designer admitted to the guild by special dispensation, published the book despite the reservations of the city's silk-weaving guild, which feared that it would disclose its techniques to competing manufacturers abroad and argued that the manuscript should be kept from publication. Joubert took it to Paris regardless. Part trade manual, part artistic education, and part guide to the capital, the book was also something of a curriculum vitae for an author newly bankrupt and petitioning the state for a pension on the strength of his expertise.

Exceptionally interesting "yearbook" in the Franconian Jahrbuch tradition, with a manuscript appendix and ex-libris Ex-libris Friedrich von Bassermann-Jordan (1872-1959), German wine estate owner, viticultural pioneer, and the most influential wine historian of his era, author of Geschichte des Weinbaus, which is the wine library of record for German viticultural history. At the heart of the book are wine and weather. Häulen records exceptional vintages alongside disastrous crop failures, noting wine and grain prices as measures of abundance and scarcity: a good or failed vintage affected rents, trade, household economies, and the prosperity of an entire wine-producing region. Grain prices therefore stand beside wine prices, as part of the same economic and environmental cycle. The chronicle also records extreme weather and natural disasters, including floods of the Main, prolonged rains, and destructive hailstorms. War, mortality, civic ceremonies, and other local events enter the same register, providing the circumstances in which harvests and prices acquired their significance. Häulen's interpretation of abundance and catastrophe through divine providence further reveals the religious framework through which an eighteenth-century community understood environmental events. In the preface, Häulen reveals some peculiarities of this specific volume: a manuscript covering only the previous century came into his hands by chance; he then sought out older reports to extend it and published the result at the request of many. Blank paper was expressly bound in at the rear so that each owner might continue the record year by year and assemble, as he puts it, a small house-chronicle for his descendants. In this copy, that invitation was taken up: twenty-two pages at the rear carry a manuscript continuation from 1742 into the 1750s in more than one hand (interestingly enough Häulen did publish a continuation in 1749, covering 1743-1748, see VD18 12344702). Blank paper for owners' entries was common in early modern Germany, most familiarly in the "Schreibkalender", produced in vast numbers from the 1540s. But the calendar was disposable, superseded each January, whereas Häulen attached continuation paper to a chronicle reaching back to antiquity and asked its owner to carry it forward (Ref. Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, The Schreibkalender - writing calendar - of early modern German-speaking Europe). Rarer still is a copy in which that invitation was actually taken up and the resulting record survived.

First edition of this monumental color-illustrated ampelography of Georgia, a comprehensive survey of over 520 Georgian grape varieties, and an extraordinary state scientific project devoted to one of the world's oldest and richest traditions of viticulture. Published by the Academy of Sciences of the Georgian SSR in parallel Georgian and Russian text, the volume set out to document a vine culture whose diversity had accumulated over centuries: more than 520 indigenous cultivars were recorded by the wider project, with fifty-seven of the most economically important selected here for detailed study and illustration. The project had been proposed at the Georgian Agricultural Institute in 1938 but took shape in earnest after 1945, when the country's viticulture was organized for study according to its historical-geographic regions - Kakheti, Kartli, Imereti, Racha-Lechkhumi, Samegrelo, Guria, Adjara, and Abkhazia. Three Georgian scholars divided the principal work. N. N. Ketskhoveli, general editor, wrote on Georgia's natural conditions and the historical geography of its viticulture; M. A. Ramishvili contributed the prospectus for its future development and numerous individual cultivar studies; and D. I. Tabidze, director of the Institute of Viticulture and Winemaking, examined the composition of Georgia's vineyards and supplied a further group of varietal monographs. The great achievement of the book, however, is visual. Artists E. Derevitskaya and E. Pomerantseva, together with two further illustrators identified as Lemkul and Azarov, were brought from Leningrad and Moscow to the Institute of Viticulture and Winemaking at Telavi, where the principal commercial cultivars were painted at natural size. The resulting fifty-seven color plates transform a state agricultural census into something approaching a botanical portrait gallery - and the first illustrated ampelography of the country. Production proved so demanding that, according to the closing note, the volume took more than fifteen years to complete, largely because of difficulties reproducing the illustrations. The colophon records that it finally went to press on 18 November 1960 in an edition of 3,000 copies. The result is much more than a Soviet agricultural handbook: a bilingual documentary census of Georgian vine culture at the point where regional memory, field observation, botanical illustration, and state taxonomy meet, preserving in remarkable color the grape varieties of a viticultural landscape undergoing rapid modernization.

Fabbroni's prize essay on winemaking, written for the Reale Accademia Economica of Florence, the Georgofili, which in 1785 had proposed a Quesito asking competitors to establish a physical theory of vinous fermentation by analysis and experiment, and to give country people a simple test for judging must. Fabbroni's Ragionamento carried the prize in September 1787 and was printed at Florence by Giuseppe Tofani that same year. Its central move is the "materia vegeto-animale", a gluten-like constituent of the grape distinct from sugar, which Fabbroni makes the true agent of fermentation - an idea ridiculed in its own century and only later recognized as a genuine forerunner of ferment theory, in the long prehistory of Pasteur's own work. He argues it twice over: once as a table of elective affinities balancing sugar, acid, and water against phlogiston and heat, and once as an experiment, compounding an artificial must from sugar, gum, tartar, and his own vegeto-animal matter and fermenting it under controlled heat into what he calls a passable cider. This printing carries a further distinction: a copy of it stood on Thomas Jefferson's own shelves. Sowerby's catalogue of Jefferson's library records the book as a gift from the author's brother, Giovanni Fabbroni, a Florentine correspondent of Jefferson's since at least 1778; Giovanni wrote from Florence in March 1789 wondering whether his brother's theory might earn him admission to the American Philosophical Society (it did not), and Jefferson replied from Paris, thanking him for a book on "a subject interesting to me, and which had not before been philosophically treated."

The rare appearance of the northern lights (aurora borealis) over Venice on the night of 16 December 1737 provided Eusebio Sguario with the occasion for this learned dissertation on natural philosophy. At a latitude where such displays were highly unusual, the phenomenon caused widespread alarm among the city's inhabitants, and Sguario sought to replace fear with reason through a systematic explanation grounded in mechanics, optics, astronomy, and observation, offering a revealing example of Enlightenment science and an early Italian contribution to Newtonian physics.

First edition of the first ethnographic study of Italian gesture, and one of the earliest works to use contemporary ethnographic observation as a tool for interpreting antiquity. Andrea De Jorio wrote as a canon of Naples Cathedral and custodian of the Real Museo Borbonico vase collection, where his work included explaining the painted Greek vases to visitors. The book was written in particular Neapolitan moment: classical antiquities were being organized, displayed, and interpreted for scholars and foreign amateurs, while the streets outside the museum supplied a living repertory of signs. De Jorio argues that contemporary Neapolitan gestures preserve forms visible on ancient vases and Roman reliefs, and that modern practice and ancient art can interpret one another. He treats hands, heads, mockery, blessing, insult, and theatrical expression as legible acts with histories. Taken as a whole, the book is an antiquarian grammar of the body, using Naples to read antiquity and antiquity to read Naples.

First edition of an early Italian manual on horsemanship addressed specifically to women. The author, signing only "F., L." and declaring himself a cousin of the Milanese noblewoman Luigia Lecchi Greppi, takes Pons d'Hostun's "Écuyer des Dames" of 1806 as his model, gathering its precepts and adapting them for the instruction of women in a distinctly Milanese context. Published in Milan in 1827, the work appeared at a curious moment in the city's history. Under Austrian administration, Milan was establishing itself as the economic and financial powerhouse of the Italian peninsula, while remaining a remarkably vivacious intellectual and cultural center. Open rebellion had been suppressed and political life was closely watched by the Austrian police, yet Milan's intellectual circles continued to sustain a spirit of resistance through literature, philosophy, and cultural exchange. The model for the work, Louis-Henri de Pons d'Hostun, approached his female reader as a rider first and a lady second. The Milanese adaptation follows him closely, offering a precise repertory of his precepts while transferring them into the social and cultural world of Restoration Milan.

A remarkable contemporary sammelband documenting the Anglo-Portuguese controversy over the regulation of the Port wine trade and the Royal Oporto Wine Company, bringing together British mercantile arguments, a Portuguese response, and the Company's own proposed program of reform. The four works trace a single, datable exchange. James Warre, a prominent London Port shipper, opened the pamphlet war in 1823, arguing from parliamentary duty-and-revenue figures that lower wine duties would raise, not lower, the Treasury's take - a case aimed as much at the Company's regulatory powers as at the Exchequer. Fleetwood Williams answered him the following year. The Wine Question Considered, published anonymously "By a Portuguese" in December 1824 and bound first in this volume, is the Portuguese-side rebuttal to both men, defending the Company's authority over demarcation, pricing, and blending on the Douro. Warre himself reissued his pamphlet within months as this volume's Second Edition, with Supplementary Observations, bound third here - answering his critics almost as quickly as they had answered him. The Companhia's own proposed reform plan of 1822, submitted to the Portuguese Cortes and bound fourth, and the London Association of Wine and Spirit Merchants' institutional report of 1826, bound second, extend the dossier on either side of the exchange proper. An early owner's ink inscription, "Rob.t Cockburn - Leith," opens the volume - a name shared with the port and sherry house Cockburn founded in that same Scottish port in 1796, though the connection is not established.

First, posthumous edition of the only treatise written by an écuyer of the royal riding school at Versailles, and the sole contemporary work known to set down its doctrine in writing. In fact, of every écuyer (equerry, or in the past "squire") who ever taught at the royal riding school of Versailles, Montfaucon de Rogles is, by the Institut français du cheval et de l'équitation's own account, the only one known to have set the school's doctrine down in a treatise: everyone else taught by demonstration only. He died before the book reached print, and his brother, a colonel of infantry and écuyer to Madame Adélaïde, wrote the dedication to the king and brought the manuscript into print at the Imprimerie Royale. The nine folding plates, engraved by La Gardette and completing the book, show floor-plans of the manège traced with the fine line of a horse's own path, building to a final plate with a complex choreography. The dedication states plainly that the work distills more than thirty years of the author's reflection and practice, a working life folded into fewer than two hundred pages of prose. The principles set out here, building a horse's training on straightness rather than the lateral flexion La Guérinière had required even in the piaffer and the passage, were carried forward through the École d'Auvergne to Baucher, and, by the École de Cavalerie's own account, into the manual drawn up when the cavalry school was founded at Saumur in 1814.

First edition of this collection of verse and prose from P. Annetta Peckham's earlier writings, printed in San Francisco in 1877, two years after her first book, Welded Links. Its centerpiece is Wine is a Mocker, an evangelical attack on drink that extends its warning as far as the wedding feast, where wine conceals a terrible outcome inside its promise of pleasure. Within eight months of the book's December 1877 dedication, newspaper reports place Peckham on a Pacific Northwest lecture platform preaching Gospel Temperance: more than ninety people signed her pledge of total abstinence before she departed on a temperance lecture tour through Eastern Oregon and Washington Territory. In Wine is a Mocker, Peckham was attacking the very industry San Francisco was helping to build. The imprint names Amanda M. Slocum, who was a Spiritualist, suffragist, and independent printer who had previously published the reform newspaper Common Sense with her husband William N. Slocum and continued in the printing trade under her own name after their divorce, making her one of a small number of women then running presses in California, at a time when printing remained overwhelmingly a male trade. This copy carries an unusually evocative provenance. Peckham presented it in 1879 to the "Rev. and Mrs. D. Bagley" of Seattle, almost certainly the pioneer Methodist minister Daniel Bagley and his wife Susannah Rogers Bagley. Daniel, who had arrived in Seattle with Susannah in 1860, established the city's Methodist Protestant church and was instrumental in securing the Territorial University for Seattle. A second inscription, dated August 1910, records the book being given by "Mrs. S. R. Bagley" to a niece: almost certainly Susannah Rogers Bagley herself, then ninety-one years old, passing on a book presented to her and her husband thirty-one years earlier. Remarkably, she still dates the inscription "Seattle, W.T." (i.e. Washington Territory) twenty-one years after Washington had become a state.

First edition of this Portuguese essay, belonging to the long European effort to reconcile Genesis with scientific discoveries and the astronomy of its own century, written by a presbyter of the Oratory of Porto. The Gazeta Litteraria reviewed the book in the same year as its publication and judged it among the works that did honor to the Portuguese nation, establishing its importance among contemporary works. Alvares organizes his work into chapters and dissertations rather than as a continuous narrative, debating Creation under two main aspects. The first is how the world was made, drawing from the Bible but also reporting modern scientific and astronomical theories, to which he adds his own contribution. The second aspect analyzed is how long the world has lasted, in what season it was created, and how many years have passed since. Here Alvares folds in Ussher's "Annals of the World" (1650), which counted the biblical generations backward to fix Creation at 4004 BC, with its chronology corrected in this edition by P. Hadriano Daude. That chronology runs straight into the book's sharpest argument, "Dissertação VII": a direct rebuttal of Isaac de la Peyrère, whose 1655 Pre-Adamite thesis (i.e. that men existed before Adam) had been burned and whose author was forced to recant in Rome. The rebuttal was not aimed at a dead controversy: Enlightenment writers across Europe were reviving Pre-Adamism as a challenge to biblical chronology, and Alvares felt compelled to answer the argument. Inocêncio 5, 353 confirms that this is the first and only edition: the work was intended to continue beyond this first volume, but no further volume is recorded as having been published.

First edition of this Saggio, in which Biffi Tolomei subjects the Tuscan estate to an unusually systematic form of practical and economic analysis, even teaching landowners how to audit its administration from the writing desk ("dal tavolino"). In the process, the author dismisses open-vat fermentation outright as "una barbaria grossolana" (a crude barbarism), and builds an empirical case for covered brick vats instead: a closed vessel keeps the cap of pomace from drying out and turning acetous, an argument for limiting exposure to air more than half a century before Pasteur supplied the microbiological explanation for acetification. At the rear, two folding tables designed as blank accounting prospectuses have, in this copy, actually been put to work. A contemporary hand entered figures in black and red ink for ten named Tuscan properties. The tables thus preserve working estate accounts from the agricultural years out of which Biffi Tolomei's system emerged. The copy carries the engraved armorial bookplate of the Ricasoli Firidolfi, with the motto Rien sans peine beneath a rampant lion, giving it an especially appropriate Tuscan viticultural provenance. The Firidolfi branch was united with Bettino Ricasoli's Brolio line in 1852 through the marriage of his daughter Elisabetta to Alberto di Giovanni Ricasoli Firidolfi, linking the provenance to the family whose name would become inseparable from the nineteenth-century development of Chianti.

In this agile booklet, horse knowledge becomes both rural science and a defense against the hazards of the marketplace. The work gathers late-eighteenth-century equestrian practice into a portable Italian handbook, firmly rooted in the Enlightenment culture of useful knowledge, where natural history, husbandry, veterinary practice, and commercial prudence meet in the body of the horse. The work is attributed to the Piedmontese Marquis Gioachino Bonaventura Argentero di Bersezio, a cavalry general and passionate hippologist. Dissatisfied with conventional military teaching, he devoted himself to the study of horses, cavalry tactics, and even troop psychology, and traveled to Prussia to procure horses for the royal armies. In his Turin palace he assembled a "choice library of all the military authors." His interests extended well beyond the stable: a founder of the Turin Academy of Sciences, he maintained his own chemical laboratory and mineralogical collection and moved in intellectual circles that included Lagrange and Lessing. This 1795 Italian edition claims fidelity to an earlier Turin edition of 1780 (followed by a Venice one in 1782) and to its copperplates (although neither 1780 nor 1782 are present in any Italian Library, as per OPAC SBN), and following the French edition of 1769.

Second edition (often miscatalogued as the first) of the first method for the education of horse and rider published by a woman, in a literature until then the province of écuyers such as La Broue, La Guérinière, and Baucher. The daughter of a Parisian shoemaker and herself a milliner before becoming a horse trainer, inventor, and businesswoman, Marie Isabelle had an extraordinary path into the traditionally male world of equitation. The book presents and shows in pictures her own device, the surfaix-cavalier (rider's surcingle), as both a technical proposition and the culmination of that improbable career: she carried her method from Vienna to Saint Petersburg, where Emperor Nicholas I entrusted her with two of his own horses, and on to the cavalry barracks at Maidstone in England. The results appear as printed endorsements on the book's own title page (approval and purchase by the French Minister of War for every army riding school, and adoption by Nicholas I for the Russian cavalry), while the volume is dedicated to his successor, Alexander II. Reception was not universally kind, and Isabelle's claims to technical authority met considerable resistance from the overwhelmingly male military and equestrian establishment. Whatever the verdict on the device itself, the curriculum taught here runs well past ordinary dressage, into flag, drum-and-pistol, music, and sabre drill: the training of a cavalry mount, not simply a riding-school horse. This substantially enlarged second French edition was published jointly by Henri Plon and the military bookseller J. Dumaine in 1858 and expanded to 284 pages. An earlier French edition, published by H. Plon alone in 1857, comprised only 128 pages; the BnF preserves an exemplar of this rare first edition, which appears to have largely escaped subsequent bibliography and scholarship, with modern accounts commonly identifying 1858 as the first French publication.

First edition of Bronner's first published book, a remarkably focused monograph on Riesling by a Wiesloch apothecary who became a viticulturist after clearing and planting a plot of waste ground. The timing was urgent: the severe winter of 1829-30 devastated vineyards across Baden and the Rhineland, and the damage formed part of the immediate background to Bronner's intervention. He wrote from his own vines, testing methods at home and against what he observed in the Palatinate and Rheingau. What makes the book particularly interesting is its concentration on a single named grape. Rather than treating pruning and training as universal techniques, or burying Riesling among dozens of "Rebsorten" (grape varieties), Bronner makes it the subject of an entire practical experiment: how does this particular vine behave, how should it be trained, and can changing its cultivation produce better wine at lower cost? His answer is the "Bockschnitt" (bush-pruning system), dispensing with the usual stakes and laths. The result is an early German contribution to variety-specific viticulture, where close observation of Riesling meets the practical economics of running a vineyard.

Printed as the "Complément du Mémoire" to an earlier submission on vine disease, this important pamphlet belongs to the first practical literature of the oidium crisis in French viticulture, and contributed to the contributed to spreading knowledge of the remedy throughout Europe. Bonnel writes as a local observer in the Narbonnais, and addresses his findings to the Minister of Agriculture in the official language of remedial experiment and rural administration. The date matters: in 1855, two years after Heuzé's ministerial report, sulfur was passing from proposed treatment to demonstrated practice against the fungus that had damaged vineyards across southern France. The tract answers that moment from within an affected wine region, converting vineyard observation into a form suitable for circulation beyond the locality. Taken whole, it is a concise record of pre-phylloxera disease management. As a prof of its importance and circulation in Europe: the Bulletin de la Société d'Encouragement pour l'Industrie Nationale, records an award to Bonnet of 500-franc in a competition on vine disease, subsequently quoting this work. The book and the author "Benito" Bonnel are mentioned also in the Gaceta de Madrid of Sept. 30, 1855, where his remedy for oidium is summarized. Last but not least The Economist in 1856 discusses the demonstrated success of sulfur treatment and mentions Bonnel of Narbonne.