{"title":"A Glass of Bordeaux, a Shelf of Curiosities","description":"\u003cp\u003eRare books La Fenice Antiquaria brings to the Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair, Oct 24-25: Dürer, Vegetius, early science, Egypt, horses and wine, 1530-1948.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"de-re-militari-flavius-vegetius-renatus-1553","title":"De re militari libri quatuor","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003eSexti Iulii frontini viri consularis de Strategematis libri totidem. Aeliani de instruendis Aciebus liber unus. Modesti de vocabulis rei militaris liber unus. Item pictuae belliae cxx. passim Vegetio adiecae. Collata sunt omnia ad antiquos codices (...) 1553 Four Books on the Art of War by Flavius Vegetius Renatus pp. [1] f.e., [8], 279, [1], [1] r.e. Bound in contemporary rigid vellum in very good condition; two red leather labels on the spine with gilt title. The upper margin of the entire volume suffered damp (possibly mold) damage, which has been carefully and expertly restored, with repairs where necessary. The flaw affects the running title, which nonetheless is always complete; the last part of the volume is more affected than the rest. Some pages are misnumbered, but the quires are correct. With 124 fresh woodcuts in the pagination, of which 121 are full-page, and two woodcut Pegasus printer’s devices on the title and final leaf. Although the restored damage in the upper margins is clearly a defect, the volume retains considerable charm, thanks to the otherwise fine condition of the plates. 12 1\/4 x 8 1\/2 x 3\/4 Latin Over a hundred Roman war machines (including incredible diving bells) charming readers for centuries. Early edition of one of the most famous military guides ever written. Drawing on earlier Republican and early Imperial sources, Vegetius distilled Roman military practice into a clear, systematic treatise emphasizing discipline, training, logistics, and strategic prudence. Rediscovered in the Middle Ages, his work became a foundational text for commanders from Charlemagne to Machiavelli, shaping European military thought for over a millennium, well beyond the introduction of gunpowder. First printed as an incunable in Utrecht in 1473, and subsequently in numerous editions that testify to its enduring success, it appears here in the first edition printed in France by Christian Wechel, the prominent Parisian publisher. In this issue, Vegetius’s renowned military treatise is published together with the works of the Roman strategists Frontinus and Aelianus. The text and 124 brilliant woodcuts together form one of the most complete accounts of classical military practice as employed during the height of the Roman Empire, a system foundational to its power. This richly illustrated edition includes detailed representations of ancient siege engines and war machines, and notably features seven early depictions of diving bells, weighted suits, and related underwater apparatus. A landmark in the history of the art of war, military engineering, and classical scholarship. Vegetius’s work is divided into four books, each systematically exploring the foundations of Roman warfare. The first treats the recruitment, training, and discipline of troops; the second, the structure and service of the legions; the third, strategy and battlefield tactics; and the fourth, siegecraft and fortifications. The accompanying 124 woodcuts are among the most striking of the sixteenth century. They present, in remarkable detail, the design and operation of ancient war machinery (battering rams, catapults, siege towers, and portable bridges) set against carefully drawn camp and battlefield settings. Of particular note are seven extraordinary illustrations showing diving bells, weighted suits, and other underwater contrivances, visual evidence of early experimentation with submersion. Other plates portray fortified cities, defensive walls, and the geometric layout of Roman military camps, as well as scenes of naval combat and the disciplined maneuvers of soldiers in formation. The figures of standard-bearers, trumpeters, and engineers, rendered with precision and rhythm (but interestingly dressed à la mode of the sixteenth century), complement Vegetius’s emphasis on the harmony between order, training, and mechanical invention. Flavius Vegetius Renatus (late 4th–early 5th century AD) was a Roman bureaucrat and military theorist. Little is known of his life, though he appears to have served in the imperial administration, perhaps under Theodosius I. An all-time blockbuster of military warfare, with over 100 theatrical plates. Vegetius managed to make war machines fascinating even to the most peaceful soul: catapults, underwater diving bells, siege towers - all choreographed like a Roman ballet of strategy and spectacle.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"La Fenice Antiquaria LLC","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47138687418603,"sku":"68-1553--4400-1735-2025","price":4400.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0766\/2000\/5611\/files\/068_010.jpg?v=1764569408"},{"product_id":"le-cabinet-de-sainte-genevieve-molinet-ertinger-1692","title":"Le Cabinet de la Bibliotheque de Sainte Genevieve","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003eDivisé en deux parties. Contenant les antiquitez de la réligion des Chrétiens, des Egyptiens, \u0026amp; des Romains. (...) Des Animaux les plus rares (...), des Coquilles (...), des Fruit etrangers (...) 1692 First Edition The Cabinet of the Library of Saint Geneviève [1] frontispiece; [1] title-page; [1] Molinet's portrait. Pp. [6], 224, [8]; 45 table plates outside the pagination, including 4 double-page plates. Contemporary vellum, minor staining; inner hinge of the front cover slightly damaged, but solid. Ownership signature and very small stamp at the title page. 2 frontispieces, portrait of Molinet, and 45 plates, all fresh and crisp, with very wide margins. An excellent, well-preserved copy with superb and richly detailed engravings. Reference: Nissen ZBI 2861; Tchmerzine Livres figurés du XVII Siècle p. 143. 16 1\/2 x 11 x 1 3\/4 French Forty-five plates to document one of the first museums and libraries, still shimmering with Baroque wunderkammer flair. A sumptuous and richly illustrated description of the Cabinet de curiosités and library of the Abbey of Sainte Geneviève in Paris; founded n the 6th century, it was one of the earliest Parisian cabinets that blended erudition, material culture, and library practice, placing Sainte-Geneviève among the great centers of learning before the Revolution. It is today across the square from the Panthéon, administered by La Sorbonne. During the Mediaeval ages the Library was already famous throughout Europe; after some difficult times during the Wars of Religions, the library was brought back to life beginning in 1619, during the reign of Louis XIII, by Cardinal Francois de Rochefoucauld, who donated six hundred volumes from his personal collection. In 1673, Claude Du Molinet became librarian and founded a small museum, the Cabinet of Curiosities, with Egyptian, Greek and Roman antiquities, medals, rare minerals and stuffed animals, within the library. By 1687 the library possessed twenty thousand books, and four hundred manuscripts. This volume, curated by Du Molinet himself, represents one of the most important testimonies to early modern collecting and the origins of museography. The first part of the volume is devoted to antiquities, while the second focuses on natural history. It presents a comprehensive survey of the abbey’s holdings. The plates, engraved in fine taille-douce by Franz Ertinger, depict the grand library and its cabinets filled with rare birds, fossils, coral branches, medals, engraved stones, minerals, and other marvels. The preface emphasizes the collection’s demonstrative, pedagogical, and scientific purpose, with several objects originating from the celebrated collection of the scholar Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc. Through its rigorous organization and didactic presentation, this work stands as a milestone in the history of collecting and museum studies. The Cabinet de la Bibliothèque de Sainte-Geneviève is one of the most visually sumptuous monuments of early modern scholarship. Its engravings by Franz Ertinger form a veritable museum on paper, chronicling the breadth of human curiosity at the end of the seventeenth century. Each image, both scientific and poetic, reveals the meticulous arrangement of Claude Du Molinet’s cabinet de curiosités, a harmonious dialogue between art, faith, and natural philosophy. Among the most impressive plates, the first seven (many in double-page format) offer panoramic views of the library and museum as they appeared: breathtaking galleries lined with bookshelves; cabinets of antiquities, specimens, and curiosities; every object placed with intention, every species rendered with accuracy and grace, reflecting both scientific observation and Baroque wonder. A total of forty-five copperplate engravings methodically explains the collections of Sainte-Geneviève, including medals and hundreds of ancient coins; antiquities and religious objects; exotic marvels such as a lizard from Brazil, the horns of rhinoceros, giraffe, and “unicorn,” a mandrake root shaped like a human figure, a so-called “mermaid’s hand,” and fossilized shells and corals, together with rare birds, fish, shells, and coral branches. Each plate is both an artwork and an intellectual map, a microcosm of the universal order Molinet sought to represent. Claude Du Molinet (1620-1687). French historian, antiquarian, and librarian, especially renowned for his historical and numismatic knowledge. He was the official librarian of the Abbey of Sainte-Geneviève from 1675 to 1687; he published a few works, but left above all a large number of manuscripts, most of which are currently kept in the reserve collection of the Sainte-Geneviève library. His masterpiece, The Cabinet of the Library of Sainte Geneviève, is a landmark work documenting one of the earliest museums of art, nature, and science, uniting faith and curiosity in the Baroque age. A paper museum of Baroque wonder? Yes please. Molinet’s cabinet turns curiosity into museography: unicorn horns, mandrakes, strange birds and fish, Egyptian relics, classical ruins, fossils, and minerals all staged with theatrical poise - and with the same earnest seriousness. A seventeenth-century world tour in engravings, plus a few enchanting panoramic views of a four-centuries-old library: we can't resist.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"La Fenice Antiquaria LLC","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47138687451371,"sku":"69-1692--5800-3046-2025","price":5800.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0766\/2000\/5611\/files\/069_010_41999057-fd2b-4324-b92c-0ac5719e5422.jpg?v=1764641468"},{"product_id":"moore-a-treatise-on-domestic-pigeons-176","title":"A Treatise on Domestic Pigeons","description":"\u003cp\u003eComprehending all the different species known in England (...); with the Method of Building and Furnishing a Lost, Area, Trap (...). The Generation of Pigeons (...) and Progress of the Egg. (...) Remarks on their Diet (...) . The fraudulent Methods (...).  1765 First Edition, second issue Pp. [2], [1] illustration, xvi, 144, [2], [13] plates London C. Barry Contemporary full leather binding with some peeling and 5 raised bands on the spine; gilt greatly faded; red spines. Back cover joint with slight damage; front cover joint splitting, but sound, despite a slight detachment at the bottom of the first pages (see images).  First free endpaper detached. Exlibris inside the cover of Robert D'Arcy, Earl of Holdernesse, with the coat of arms of the House of D'Arcy. Second modern exlibris on the first free endpaper with an image of a bird and the name Erich Horstkötter. Ink stain to the outer margin of the first plate and title page. Some woodcut ornaments and tailpieces. 13 refined etchings depict different pigeon breeds in a vivid and engaging manner. Despite the binding defects, a beautiful, rare copy with interesting provenance. First edition, second issue of this Treatise, which stands as the first English book devoted to pigeons, and as a work of marked rarity. In late 18th cent England dovecots were extremely trending among affluent property owners and belonged to a wider culture of improvement, breeding, and close practical observation of domestic animals. This volume presents a comprehensive manual on pigeon breeding and care, gathering all known English varieties and weighing their respective qualities with the method of an experienced fancier. The book explains the construction and management of housing - lofts, traps, and related arrangements - together with breeding methods used by expert breeders. It also treats the biology of pigeons, including the development of the egg, and extends its instruction to diet, common diseases and their treatment, and fraudulent practices in the pigeon trade. Intended alike for experienced breeders and beginners, the work joins practical guidance to a broader natural-historical curiosity, while its illustrations, drawn from life, render the birds in a vivid manner and with accurate detail. This copy also carries an interesting provenance, described below. John Moore (d. 1737) privately printed this work with the title Columbarium in 1735 in a very small batch. It was later published in 1765 under the title A Treatise on Domestic Pigeons in an edition of only 750 copies (to which the current one belongs). This second printing was published anonymously by a practical pigeon fancier. However, it is an exact reproduction of Moore's Columbarium of 1735 with a longer title and the addition of the engraved plates. According to the vulgata, the present volume is considered the second issue of the first edition by Moore, but some scholars disagree, preferring to attribute the volume to an unknown author.  The book is an extensive treatise on pigeons that surveys the breeds found in England, outlining their defining traits and standards of quality. It provides practical instruction on constructing and equipping lofts, selecting and breeding desirable birds, and managing their feeding and health, including remedies for common illnesses. The work also examines reproduction and egg formation, warns against deceptive sales practices, and was designed for both seasoned enthusiasts and newcomers. A detailed account of the prized Almond Tumbler gives particular prominence to one of the most admired varieties of the period. It is supported by 13 detailed, life-based etchings representing different pigeon breeds in a vivid and engaging manner, as well as 1 dynamic illustration of a dovecot with a mouse and a cat (facing the title page). It also includes digressions on folklore that reflect the cultural limitations of the period, such as on pp. 140–141, where the Prophet Muhammad is described as having trained pigeons to appear to whisper divine revelations in his ear.  The volume contains two ex libris, the first of which offers notable provenance, indicating ownership by Robert D'Arcy (or Darcy. 4th Earl of Holderness (1718-1778), British diplomat and politician, who served in Venice and the Hague, on top of several roles in England under King George II and III. Given his life dates, he was most likely the first owner of the book. Notably, during the remodeling of his property Arbour Hill farm in 1760, a dovecot was added to provide fresh eggs and meat, as per the trends of the period. Curiously, he collaborated with the musician Handel in the production of the opera Deidamia. No relevant info has been traced about the second, modern exlibris. Pigeons step boldly into 18th-century England with wit and swagger, at last receiving the attention their curious intelligence deserves. This rare first English treatise - here in its first edition - pairs lively, life-based etchings of breeds with a playful dovecot scene (cat and mouse included). Its aristocratic provenance becomes an additional quiet delight, gently enchanting the reader (and the fortunate collector) appreciating the charm and dignity of these curious birds.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"La Fenice Antiquaria","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48097364672747,"sku":"110-1765--1850-1044-46101.7166666667","price":1850.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0766\/2000\/5611\/files\/00110_IMG_7352copy.jpg?v=1776208879"},{"product_id":"durer-della-simmetria-dei-corpi-umani-1591","title":"Della simmetria dei corpi humani","description":"\u003cp\u003eLibri quattro. On the Symmetry of Human Bodies. 1591 First Italian Edition Leaves [1] f.e, [6], 143 (including 3 folded plates), [1] colophon; [1] r.e. Venetia (Venice) Domenico Nicolini Modern period-style binding, full morocco, with blind and gilt tooling to boards and spine; spine with five raised bands. Leaf 29 misnumbered 27; leaf 74 skipped in the pagination (but complete, as in other copies). Four double-page plates on three folded leaves (the first two only on the recto; the others printed on recto and verso on the same leaf, pp. 96–97). 110 woodcut illustrations throughout the text. Very small numerical calculations in ink on the front endpaper, in an early hand; possibly the same hand annotated the rear endpaper with notes in Italian relating to the subject matter of the book, with references to Michelangelo Buonarroti. Minor worming at the upper inner margin of the last 40 leaves, well away from text and images. The folded plate 98 has been professionally restored at the back of the fold. Light browning to a few of the final text pages. A crisp copy, in very good condition. First Italian edition of Albrecht Dürer’s celebrated treatise on human proportion, translated from the Latin version printed in Nuremberg between 1532 and 1534. Originally conceived as an instructional manual for artists and first published in German in 1528, the work applies mathematical proportion to the depiction of the human body in pursuit of harmonious form. Dürer’s position within Renaissance debates is distinctive: unlike Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, he rejected anatomical dissection, believing that anatomy fragmented the body and obscured its unity. Geometry and proportion, by contrast, offered a comprehensive vision of the figure. Published posthumously in Venice by Nicolini in 1591, this folio edition is a cornerstone of scientific anthropometry. The translation by Giovanni Paolo Gallucci expands the original four books with a fifth, addressing the artistic representation of human diversity. Celebrated and influential, the work bridges Renaissance art theory and scientific inquiry. This treatise, written, illustrated, and designed by Dürer, is the first printed work to address comparative and differential anthropometry, drawing on classical sources (Villard de Honnecourt, Vitruvius, Alberti, and da Vinci) while presenting an original study of human physiques. Dürer’s mathematical system of proportion aimed to provide artists with tools to depict all human types, treating beauty as relative and grounded in geometry. The four books cover proportions of adults and infants, mathematical transformations of proportions, and the geometry of bodily movement, accompanied by detailed woodcut diagrams with early cross-hatching techniques. The volume contains three double-page plates and over a hundred full-page woodcut illustrations demonstrating Dürer’s mathematical and geometric approach to the human form. The illustrations are copies of the original woodcuts from the first German edition (Nuremberg, 1528), executed by Hieronymus Andreä \"Formschneider\" (literally \"the woodblock cutter\") after Dürer's widow request.  The text systematically examines human proportions through constructed scales and measurements: the body divided into seven and eight parts, separate studies of men, women, and children, variations of corpulence and thinness governed by mathematical rules, and figures shown in movement and foreshortening. Giovanni Paolo Gallucci’s Italian translation proved the most enduring and frequently cited version of Durer's masterwork during the following centuries. The work is grounded in the relationship between beauty and proportion, and between microcosm and macrocosm, concepts central not only to early modern visual theory but also to music, physiognomic and humoral theory, astronomy and astrology, cosmology, theology, philosophy, and even mnemonics and poetry. Gallucci further expanded the original work by adding a Preface, a Life of Dürer, and a Fifth Book, which provides a philosophical framework for interpreting Dürer’s original four books and situates the mathematical study of the body within a broader humanistic worldview. A chance to see inside Dürer’s mind as he works through form, proportion, and beauty, across more than a hundred woodcuts on his own design, supporting his original approach: rigorous, systematic, and unmistakably brilliant.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"La Fenice Antiquaria","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48097442300139,"sku":"84-1591--4900-2548-2025","price":4900.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0766\/2000\/5611\/files\/0084_IMG_6864.jpg?v=1776196008"},{"product_id":"cavallo-a-complete-treatise-1777","title":"A complete treatise of electricity in theory and practice","description":"\u003cp\u003ewith original experiments A Complete Treatise of Electricity in Theory and Practice, with Original Experiments 1777 First Edition Pp. [1] f.e., xvi, viii, 412 [4], III folded plates London Edward and Charles Dilly Contemporary light blue boards, with slight signs of wear. Uncut, very light foxing at limited leaves. Pp. 41-48 omitted in pagination, as customary. In excellent condition. First edition of the author's first substantial scientific publication, and one of the most important English-language treatises on electricity of the 18th century, when discoveries about electricity (linked to figures like Franklin and Volta, and to devices such as Leyden jars, lightning rods, and electrometers) were being organized into a clearer, teachable system.Published just two years before his election as Fellow of the Royal Society in 1779, the Treatise established his reputation as the foremost English-language systematizer of electrical knowledge, thanks to its disciplined arrangement of a rapidly expanding field: electricity becoming not only a subject of wonder, but a practical, illustrated, and increasingly standardized science. The treatise is divided into four parts, reflecting the author's conviction that the science could be presented with full rigour only by separating established fact from hypothesis, and both from practical instruction. Part I, \"Fundamental Laws of Electricity,\" treats basic terminology, electrics and conductors, positive and negative electricity, methods of excitation, communicated electricity, the Leyden phial, atmospheric electricity, practical advantages, and a summary of principal properties. Part II, \"Theory of Electricity,\" is expressly hypothetical, with the preface noting that this section relates \"not to facts, but to opinions\" and that the \"great improbability of most of these hypotheses\" kept it brief. Part III, \"Practical Electricity,\" covers apparatus, machine design, components, experimental setup, attraction and repulsion, electric light, the Leyden phial, charged electrics, lightning conductors, the electrical battery, and further properties of the Leyden phial. Part IV, \"New Experiments in Electricity,\" presents the author's contributions: the electrical kite and kite experiments, atmospheric and rain electrometers, the electrophorus, a machine for producing perpetual electricity, experiments on colours, and promiscuous experiments. The introduction traces the history from Theophrastus and amber through William Gilbert (hailed as the father of the science), Boyle, Otto von Guericke, Newton, Hawkesbee, and Stephen Grey, whose rediscovery marks the \"true flourishing era.\" The three folding copperplates, engraved by John Lodge after drawings by T. Conde, depict machines, Leyden jars, electrometers, conductors, kite apparatus, and related instruments. The work went through three further editions in the author's lifetime, the second in 1782 and the third in three volumes between 1786 and 1795, each substantially enlarged, and remained a standard reference for both neophytes and advanced experimenters.  Cavallo's treatise tames electricity's chaos into elegant order, complete with gleaming instruments and bold ideas: Enlightenment curiosity wired into a beautifully teachable form - for the first time.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"La Fenice Antiquaria","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48150053552363,"sku":"139-1777--850-123-2026","price":850.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0766\/2000\/5611\/files\/00139_IMG_8001.jpg?v=1777186983"},{"product_id":"segato-atlante-monumentale-del-1837","title":"Atlante monumentale del Basso e dell'Alto Egitto","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003eIllustrato dal prof. Domenico Valeriani e compilato dal fu Girolamo Segato con disegni tratti dalle opere di Denon, della Commissione Francese, di Gau, di Caillaud e di Rosellini e con quelli dallo stesso compilatore eseguiti sul luogo. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003eMonumental Atlas of Lower and Upper Egypt illustrated by Prof. D. Valeriani and compiled by the late G. Segato, with drawings taken from the works of Denon, the French Commission, Gau, Cailliaud, and with those executed on site by the compiler himself \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e1837 \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003eVol. I: leaves [1] f.e., [2], [65] plates, [1] r.e.; Vol. II: [1] f.e., [2], [95] plates, [1] r.e. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003eFirenze Nello stabilimento posto nei Fondacci di S. Spirito N.° 1993 \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003eContemporary half leather over marbled paper-covered boards, spine gilt-decorated with raised bands. The binding shows wear to the corners and extremities, with well-executed repairs and restoration. Light foxing throughout, with some localized heavier spotting. The hand-coloured plates retain their original period coloring in excellent condition. A large-format atlas with binding wear, but internally preserving its magnificent plates. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003eSecond edition (first published in 1835) of one of the most ambitious and lavishly illustrated nineteenth-century surveys of Egypt, uniting archaeology, topography, and landscape in a monumental atlas published at the height of Europe's fascination with the Nile. Conceived by the explorer, chemist, and antiquarian Girolamo Segato (1792-1836), the work grew out of his travels through Egypt and Nubia after 1818, where, together with the engineer Lorenzo Masi, he explored and surveyed territories extending beyond Wadi Halfa along the Blue and White Nile, regions then only imperfectly known to European scholarship. Rather than limiting itself to the celebrated monuments of the lower Nile, the atlas sought to assemble a comprehensive visual record of Egypt's ancient remains, architecture, landscapes, and antiquities, combining Segato's own field drawings with material derived from the great Egyptological expeditions of Denon, Gau, Cailliaud, Rosellini, and the French scientific commission. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003eFollowing Segato's death in 1836, the work was reissued under the direction of Professor Domenico Valeriani, whose name appears alongside that of the late Segato on the title page. In that occasion, two octavo text volumes were also issued under the title Nuova illustrazione istorico-monumentale del Basso e dell'Alto Egitto, sometimes preserved together with the present Atlas. The atlas contains 160 engraved plates (numbered 1-99, with numerous plates bis, ter, etc.), including 8 double-page plates, 45 hand-colored plates (among them four of the six maps), approximately 150 aquatints devoted principally to landscapes, monuments, and city views, and approximately 150 etchings depicting costumes, animals, plants, antiquities, and architectural details. Among the most striking views is the magnificent Cairo during the Nile Flood, one of the finest panoramas of the series, but the colored depictions of objects, mummies, wall paintings are particularly striking and charming. The visual journey begins in Alexandria, with topographical plans, harbour views, and the celebrated Pianta della Città del Cairo, before following the Nile southward through Egypt. Funerary monuments and burial customs give way to the pyramids of Abu Sir, El-Lahun, and Meidum, shown in plans, elevations, and sections, while the great temple complexes of Dendera, Latopolis, Luxor, Karnak, and Thebes are documented through architectural surveys of façades, columns, capitals, ceilings, reliefs, and hieroglyphic inscriptions. Interspersed throughout are portraits of Coptic monks after Denon, studies of scarabs, amulets, funerary figures, ornaments, and other antiquities, together with scenes of contemporary Egyptian life. One particularly evocative group of plates, devoted to the desert route between Qena and Quseir, records not monuments but survival itself: water-carriers at a well, desert vegetation, and even a flea are observed with the same documentary precision as the ancient ruins. The atlas concludes with views of Philae, studies of Ababda costume and dwellings, and finely reproduced hieroglyphic manuscripts, including a beautifully illuminated example with red and black rubrication, bringing together archaeology, landscape, ethnography, and natural history in a single visual survey of nineteenth-century Egypt. Some books preserve information; this one preserves fascination. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003eThe hand coloring alone is enough to stop us in our tracks. Rich, luminous, and astonishingly fresh, these plates preserve the sense of wonder with which nineteenth-century Europe looked upon Egypt: a land where colossal temples, painted mummies, hieroglyphs, and everyday life seemed equally worthy of admiration. More than an atlas, it is a beautifully colored monument to Egyptomania at its most elegant.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"La Fenice Antiquaria","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49048619679979,"sku":"179-1837--8200-5170-2026","price":8200.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0766\/2000\/5611\/files\/00179_IMG_9688.jpg?v=1784062295"},{"product_id":"anonymous-la-grande-danse-macabre-1728","title":"La grande danse macabre","description":"\u003cp\u003e1728\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn 4to. Pp. [1] f.e., 1-76, [1] r.e.\u003cbr\u003e\nTroyes\u003cbr\u003e\nJean-Antoine Garnier\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eContemporary marbled boards, rubbed; spine worn and cracked, but sound, with small losses at the head and foot and an early paper shelf label, \"197.\" Mounted heraldic bookplate on the front pastedown, identifiable through heraldic research as that of the von Neindorff family, an old Saxon noble house and hereditary cupbearers to the Dukes of Brunswick, bearing the characteristic zigzag bend and stag with the motto trew ist wildbrat (\"loyalty is as rare and prized as game\"). Characteristic browning and foxing throughout on the inexpensive papier à chandelle typical of Bibliothèque bleue publications, with occasional soiling, light marginal wear, and a few small marginal chips. The lower margin has been trimmed very close to the text, occasionally affecting signatures but never the printed text itself. A sound, attractive copy of an intrinsically fragile popular production. Fine.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eA 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 form the Library of a noble German family.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eLa 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe title-page is adorned with a (so to say) lively woodcut of four skeleton musicians, immediately announcing the macabre pageant that follows. The volume is illustrated throughout with sixty woodcuts (some original and some reproduction of earlier editions), retaining much of the directness and expressive power of their medieval prototypes: animated skeletons seize popes and princes, monks and merchants, physicians, lawyers, lovers, and laborers alike, leading each inexorably into the universal dance. Following the author's prologue (\"Ô créature raisonnable... C'est la Danse des Machabées\"), each encounter unfolds as a dialogue in verse, Death first addressing its victim before receiving a reply, the paired texts printed beneath the corresponding woodcut. A second procession extends the dance to women, from queens and duchesses to brides, pregnant women, nuns, and young gentlewomen, reaffirming that beauty, youth, wealth, and rank offer no exemption from mortality. The accompanying illustrations are remarkably theatrical, juxtaposing the living and the dead with a stark economy of line that made the Danse Macabre one of the most enduring visual inventions of late medieval Europe. The volume concludes with several companion texts in the tradition of the ars moriendi, including La Mort menace l'humain lignage, the Exhortation de bien vivre et de bien mourir, and a concluding prayer.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThere's something deliciously fitting about this particular copy, as if its delightfully rock'n'roll skeletons weren't already enough to make us smile. This modest Bibliothèque bleue edition (printed cheaply for a mass readership) survives from the library of a noble German family. The book seems to have practiced exactly what it preached, paying little attention to social hierarchy: just as, in the Danse Macabre, kings and queens, merchants, bishops, beggars, and lovers all take Death's hand in turn, so too did this humble chapbook find its way into aristocratic hands - and now into ours.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"La Fenice Antiquaria","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49318587760875,"sku":null,"price":3200.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0766\/2000\/5611\/files\/00158_IMG_8664_1.jpg?v=1788120350"},{"product_id":"kern-eyn-new-kunstlichs-wolge-1530","title":"Eyn new Kunstlichs wolgegründts Visierbüchl","description":"\u003cp\u003e1531 First Edition\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn Folio. Leaves [1] f.e., [1], lvi, [1] folding woodcut plate, [1] r.e.\u003cbr\u003e\nStraßburg (Strasbourg)\u003cbr\u003e\nPeter Schöffer, bei Hansen Schwyntzern\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eModern olive brown morocco, richly gilt- and blind-tooled, spine with four raised bands. The upper margins are somewhat shorter than in an otherwise well-margined copy; in a couple of larger illustrations, the upper margins have been trimmed close to the upper edge, causing minor losses, due to the fact that the images were originally printed well beyond the normal text area. many other small and big woodcuts in the text. Later bookplate of Owen Gingerich on the front pastedown, with the motto \"Coeli enarrant gloriam Dei\" and the initial G enclosing a globe. Handwritten ownership note at the back of leaf lvi \"Alessandro Volpi\". A clean, fresh, and attractive copy of this rare work, with distinguished provenance. Fine.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFirst 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eCompleted 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThis 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe book opens with an illustrated title page: a woodcut depicts a cooper or wine gauger standing behind a large wooden cask, demonstrating the use of a gauging rod (Visierrute). Holding the long graduated rod horizontally across the barrel while taking a measurement with his right hand, he illustrates the practical operation at the heart of the Visierbuch: determining the capacity of a cask geometrically without filling it. The barrel is shown with pronounced staves and iron hoops, emphasizing its commercial rather than decorative function.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe following text is divided into three parts. The first explains the construction of gauging rods from geometrical principles, introducing square and cube roots through tables and diagrams. The second applies these methods to the differing systems of measurement used throughout the German lands, illustrating the geometrical constructions with numerous diagrams and a striking folding plate. The final section presents completed gauging rods for the principal regional measures, together with multiplication tables, worked examples, exchange calculations, and the printed rod scales used in practice. Throughout, the units are those of the barrel trade, including Fuder, Saum, Ohm, Eimer, Viertel, and Maß.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe volume is illustrated with numerous text diagrams, a large folding plate, and a handsome colophon woodcut. Particularly noteworthy is the use of red and black printing in the rod scales: the red rules form continuous measuring lines while the black dots mark the graduations, making color an essential functional element rather than decoration.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWine, geometry, and the dawn of printing, what's not to love? This ingenious little manual taught merchants how to measure a cask without ever filling it, transforming mathematics into an everyday tool of the wine trade. But we also fell for its printing pedigree: produced by Peter Schöffer the Younger, son of Gutenberg's apprentice and grandson of his financier, it leaves you only two degrees of separation from the invention of printing itself. Add handsome diagrams, clever red-and-black typography, and a delightful woodcut or two, and this is exactly the sort of book that makes our hearts skip a beat.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"La Fenice Antiquaria","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49353634250987,"sku":null,"price":3800.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0766\/2000\/5611\/files\/00152_IMG_8683_fc547ba9-8305-4965-9e9c-448d6ded079a.jpg?v=1788647044"},{"product_id":"chasteigner-les-vins-de-bordeaux-1869","title":"Les Vins de Bordeaux.","description":"\u003cp\u003e1869; 1868; 1870; 1870\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn 8vo, small. I. pp. 68, [1].\u003cbr\u003e\nII. pp. [4], 8, 10, [2], 15, 23, 64, 16, 20, 11, 23, [3], 19, 6, [2].\u003cbr\u003e\nIII. pp. 113, [11] advertising.\u003cbr\u003e\nIV. pp. [4], 99, [5] plates, [2].\u003cbr\u003e\nBordeaux\u003cbr\u003e\nLibrairie Centrale (B. de Laporte). Goudin. Féret. De Laporte \u0026amp; Vilotte\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eContemporary half-leather binding; spine gilt-ruled and lettered \"Œuvres de Meste Verdié.\" Front hinge worn but sound; board margins rubbed. The final ten leaves of the volume are slightly loose. Handwritten note on the front flyleaf; presentation inscription on the half-title of the fourth work. Various sets of illustrations throughout. Very good.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThis Sammelband gathers four strands of Bordeaux's own reading culture around 1870 under a single binding: a vineyard owner's practical guide to the region's wines, a dead local poet's collected verse in Gascon dialect, a wine-trade almanac for the coming year, and a satirical civic pamphlet in defense of the city's women. Together they read less as four unrelated pamphlets than as a portrait of what an educated Bordelais of the period might have kept on a single shelf. The compilation spans two years. Paul de Chasteigner's Vins de Bordeaux, in its second and enlarged edition of 1869, opens the volume - its author a vineyard owner at Bourg-en-Gironde, writing for the general reader rather than the trade, and straying along the way into real estate history: the young Chateau Palmer under its earlier name, and Baron James de Rothschild's celebrated 1868 purchase of Chateau Lafite. Antoine Verdie, the Gascon poet known as Meste Verdie, had been dead almost half a century by the time Goudin issued this posthumous collected edition in 1868; Edouard Feret's Almanach du Buveur for 1870 - from the publisher that would make Bordeaux et ses vins a standard reference - closes with a dated account of the vine's newest and gravest disease. Jacques Le Doux's La Bordelaise, illustrated by the caricaturist Paul Hadol and co-published in Bordeaux and Paris the same year, completes the set. A contemporary handwritten note on the front endpaper lists all four in the order bound. A presentation inscription on the half title of the fourth work is hardly decipherable.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eI. Les Vins de Bordeaux (Chasteigner, 1869, 2nd edition). A practical guide to choosing, using, and keeping table wines. Notably recounts the history of Chateau Palmer: Alexandre-Antoine de Gasq, a councillor of the Parlement and friend of the Marechal de Richelieu, whose Cantenac vineyard - then known simply as Gasq - took the name Palmer only later, with a small woodcut, 'Ancienne construction du chateau Palmer.' A Chateau Lafite vintage price table, 1815-1868, and a portrait of Baron James de Rothschild, closes on the estate's celebrated 1868 sale.\u003cbr\u003e\nII. Oeuvres completes de Meste Verdie (Antoine Verdie, 1779-1820; posthumous collected edition, Goudin, 1868). Gascon-dialect comic and tragic verse, gathering several originally separate pieces that each retain their own pagination: 'Abanture comique de Meste Bernat ou Guillaoumet de retour dens sous Fougueys,' illustrated (signed H. Gouillaud, engraver); 'Catastrophe affruse arribade a Meste Bernat ou la separatioun dam Mariote,' illustrated (signed J.B. Benard and H. Gouillaud); 'La mort de Mariote ou Meste Bernat Benge,' illustrated (signed Renard and H. Gouillaud); 'La Mort de Guillaumet,' a tragedy in two acts and verse, first performed at the Theatre-Francais de Bordeaux on 11 January 1817; and 'Le Proces de Carnaval ou Les Masques en Insurrection,' a comedy in one act and verse.\u003cbr\u003e\nIII. Almanach du Buveur, du Negociant en Vins et du Viticulteur pour 1870 (Edouard Feret). Practical content for the wine trade and its customers: decanting apparatus and corkscrew figures; a book notice for Jules Gouffe's Le Livre de Cuisine, with two of its recipe plates reproduced, 'Lievre a la broche' and 'Pigeons a l'anglaise'; an illustrated account of Phylloxera Vastatrix under the heading 'Nouvelle maladie de la vigne', citing M. Planchon's microscope description and naming, in a footnote, M. Laliman of the Gironde; French wine export statistics by destination country; and, elsewhere in the volume. Illustrations in the text signed H. Gouillaud after J.B. Benard and Renard. Illustrations in the text.\u003cbr\u003e\nIV. La Bordelaise (Jacques Le Doux, illustrated by Paul Hadol, 1870, co-published Bordeaux and Paris). A humorous 'apologie,' historical and moral in its framing, defending the character of Bordeaux's women. Illustrated with a frontispiece, figures, and an illustrated wrapper. Five plates in total, unpaginated - including three named costume plates: 'La Bordelaise en 1795,' 'en 1800-1830,' and 'en 1827.'\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFour books, one Bordeaux: wine and vineyards, Gascon poetry, the trade's annual almanac, and a caricatured defense of the city's women, all bound together around 1870, when Château Lafite was just bought by Rothschild. We like sammelbands precisely for this: someone else's bookshelf reduced to a single volume, preserving not just what Bordeaux drank, but what it read, laughed at, and worried about.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"La Fenice Antiquaria","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49376612057323,"sku":"193-1869--800.00-42.00-2026","price":800.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0766\/2000\/5611\/files\/00193_IMG_0297.jpg?v=1788836488"},{"product_id":"cysat-mathemata-astronomica-de-loco-1619","title":"Mathemata astronomica de loco, motu, magnitudine et causis cometa","description":"\u003cp\u003e1619 First Edition\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn 4to. Pp. (1) f.e., [8], 84, [4].\u003cbr\u003e\nIngolstadt\u003cbr\u003e\nEx Typographeo Ederiano\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFull contemporary limp parchment, minor soiling; manuscript title 'De Cometa' on spine. Water stains in the outer margin at the front and again in the final third, generally not touching text; browning in gatherings H, L, M, and some general toning. Title page with a mute paper seal glued on the left side; very early inscription 'Abbas d. Iulius emit. 1694' in an interline, and circular ink stamp 'Bibl. S. Puden. de Urbe' on the right. Later Owen Gingerich bookplate at the inner front cover, with motto \"Coeli enarrant gloriam Dei,\" initial G enclosing a globe; ink shelfmark on the same leaf. Some age-related defects but rare, with provenance and perfectly enjoyable. Very good.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe first treatise to record observation of a comet with a telescope, and the earliest to describe and depict a cometary nucleus and its surrounding coma, with provenance from the Library of Owen Gingerich. Cysat's Mathemata astronomica belongs to the lively debate surrounding the great comets of 1618, when new scientific instruments were challenging old cosmologies. From parallax, Cysat placed the comet far beyond the Moon, helping to displace the Aristotelian view of comets as atmospheric vapors and bringing his observations into line with those of Tycho Brahe and other Jesuit astronomers. The apparitions of 1618 also provoked the bitter comet controversy in which Orazio Grassi in Rome and Cysat in Germany argued from parallax for distant celestial bodies, while Galileo (ill and without having observed the comets himself) treated them as atmospheric optical effects and dismissed parallax measurements as inconclusive. On the central physical question, the Cysat and the Jesuits were right.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eCysat sets out his treatise in seven chapters that move methodically from raw observation to physical cause, a structure he announces in the preface. The first chapter assembles the observations themselves, running from 1 December 1618 to 22 January 1619, each position of the comet fixed by its distance from two fixed stars; a table on p. 20 gathers the results in parallel columns of latitude, longitude, declination, right ascension, digression from the sun, and diurnal motion. From this foundation, the later chapters build outward. Caput IV traces the coma and tail across the sky in a sequence of full-page woodcuts, carrying the comet through Boötes, Virgo, and Draco, while a large plate sets its path against the orb of the sun. Caput VI explains and depicts the head resolving over the course of December from a solid disc into a swarm of starry points; Cysat likens three bright starlets within it to the luminous companions of Jupiter, \"aeque clarae atque lucidissimi Iovis Comites\" (\"as bright as Jupiter's brightest satellites\"). The same chapter contains his much-discussed remark on a nebulous appearance, on the strength of which he is sometimes, probably wrongly, credited with the discovery of the Orion Nebula. Cysat's work formed part of a wider contemporary discussion of the comet: Kepler, who corresponded with Cysat and visited Ingolstadt, and Orazio Grassi both published treatments of the same apparition in 1619.\u003cbr\u003e\nThe provenance is particularly apt: this copy comes from the library of Owen Gingerich (1930-2023), the Harvard historian of astronomy and author of the celebrated census of surviving copies of Copernicus's De revolutionibus.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eCute bear images (with fur and all), strange angels, interestingly dressed gentlemen... oh wait, they are constellations (Ursa, Virgo, Boötes), and the book is all about a comet racing across the sky 400 years ago?! And it is not your average phenomenon: the comet was observed for the first time with a telescope, and, again for the first time, described with its nucleus and surrounding coma, sparking a debate with Galileo, who was exceptionally wrong. Gingerich knew it was an exceptional volume, and his bookplate proving the provenance reminds us that astronomy rarely gets this many goosebumps in one book.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"La Fenice Antiquaria","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49385892380907,"sku":"144-1619--5800.00-2286.00-2026","price":5800.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0766\/2000\/5611\/files\/00144_IMG_8763_b10b04db-5c74-468b-8320-787aee72de2d.jpg?v=1790637751"},{"product_id":"zindel-der-eislauf-oder-das-1825","title":"Der Eislauf oder das Schrittschuhfahren","description":"\u003cp\u003e1825 First Edition\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn 8vo. Pp. [1] f.e., [1] frontispiece, IV, 180, [5] plates, [1] r.e.\u003cbr\u003e\nNuremberg (Nürnberg)\u003cbr\u003e\nFriedrich Campe\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eOriginal paper boards, with rich illustration on both covers and spine (no editorial notes); green edges. Paper slightly green\/bluish. Six illustrations in total outside of pagination. Some slight rubbing at the edges, very light internal spotting. A very beautiful copy. Fine.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eAn 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.\u003cbr\u003e\nThe 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe charm of this little book begins with its covers: the original illustrated paper boards are ornamented with a zodiacal border and pictorially printed with skaters and the snow-bringing North Wind on the front, and King Winter on the rear. The engraved frontispiece shows Nuremberg's famous skating ground at the Dutzendteich, with a large crowd of people frolicking on the ice. The other five engravings in the book, by Adam Klein, depict different forms of skates and figures of ice skating, while the accompanying text explains them in considerable detail. The first part, pp. 1-78, forms a graded course of instruction: encouragement by word and example; the choice and fastening of skates; the skater's dress; laying out the rink; the first attempt on the ice; and the four elementary movements (straight running, crossing over, the outside-edge curve, and the turn) followed by stance and carriage, group figures, the ice-sledge, precautions, and a concluding note on the literature of the sport. The appendix, beginning on p. 79, gathers poems, letters, essays, and literary quotations relating to ice skating, chiefly by Klopstock, Goethe, Herder, and Platen, including Goethe's \"Die Eisbahn\" (\"The Ice Rink\"). Throughout, the text contains numerous remarks on races, speed records, ice festivals, Parisian novelties, and other curiosities of contemporary skating.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eSkating has a soft spot at La Fenice, and this little book is exactly our kind of quirky find. The illustrated boards alone would have won us over; but inside, elegant figures glide across the ice in impeccable frocks and fine skates - although our twenty-first-century minds remain puzzled by the ladies being carried about in chairs rather than simply joining the fun. Passing nods to Goethe and other German writers complete the charm of this delightful skating manual mixing athletic pursuit, social theater, erudite entertainment, and excuses to dress remarkably well.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"La Fenice Antiquaria","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49385892479211,"sku":"145-1825--3400.00-2174.00-2026","price":3400.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0766\/2000\/5611\/files\/00145_IMG_8777.jpg?v=1788990595"},{"product_id":"clerc-principes-sur-la-culture-1825","title":"Principes sur la culture de la vigne en cordons","description":"\u003cp\u003e1825\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn 8vo. Pp. [3], 81, [1]\u003cbr\u003e\nChatillon-sur-Seine\u003cbr\u003e\nCharles Cornillac\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eOriginal contemporary paper wrappers (showing signs of age) with hand-written title by a contemporary hand. Red paper spine with a manuscript label. Original stabbing threads preserved, but exposed at the inner hinge. Scattered light foxing; light watermark at the final 20 pages. The hand-colored plate is fresh and well preserved. The final leaf is pasted to the inner rear wrapper. A charming complete copy.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003ePublished in the heart of Burgundy's Côte-d'Or, this early French treatise belongs to the generation of practical manuals that transformed viticulture from inherited custom into a system of observation, economy, and reproducible technique. Identified on the title page only as \"M. Clerc,\" the author presents himself as a reformer of vineyard practice, arguing that higher yields and lower cultivation costs could be achieved through disciplined pruning rather than greater labor or larger plantings. His cordon system is conceived a portable method, beyond regional practices: the vine is reduced to a carefully ordered structure whose trunk, permanent arms, renewal wood, and trellising can be replicated from one vineyard to another.\u003cbr\u003e\nLong before cordon training became standard across much of the wine-growing world, Clerc offered one of its earliest self-contained expositions, extending from the architecture of the vineyard to the cellar practices that completed the system.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe book opens with a finely hand-colored engraved plate in front of the title page, and it depicts a vine-grower training a cordon vine against stakes; the lettered keys identify each structural element of the vine, including the souche, mère-branche, allonge, and souchet à ravaler.\u003cbr\u003e\nThe small treatise proceed to unfold over eleven chapters. Following a historical introduction that traces viticulture from Asia through Caesar's Gallic campaigns, Domitian's prohibitions, and the revival under Probus, it begins with the principles of planting before establishing the technical vocabulary of the cordon itself: souche, mères-branches, allonge, souchets, pousses-de-souchets, and remplaçant. Clerc then treats pruning, treillage, tying (accolage), debudding (ébourgeonnement), renewal of fruiting wood, general vineyard maintenance, wall-trained trellises, and the practical advantages of the cordon system, concluding with a chapter on la manière de faire le vin. The winemaking section recommends fermentation vessels broader at the base than at the mouth and provides directions for treading, pressing, and managing the must.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eLong before cordon training became standard, Clerc was already sketching out the vineyard of the future. Yet what truly won us over is this copy itself: the charming original wrappers with their contemporary handwriting and the beautifully hand-colored frontispiece, turning a practical pruning manual into a deeply personal survivor.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"La Fenice Antiquaria","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49385892708587,"sku":"154-1825--450.00-97.00-2026","price":450.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0766\/2000\/5611\/files\/00154_IMG_8886_6da45a51-d794-4495-a063-650a085469f9.jpg?v=1789356280"},{"product_id":"haulen-jahrbuch-alter-und-neuer-1742","title":"Jahrbuch alter und neuer Nachrichten oder historische Beschreibung","description":"\u003cp\u003e1743 First Edition\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn 4to. Pp. [16], 112, [22].\u003cbr\u003e\nOnolzbach (Ansbach)\u003cbr\u003e\nChristoph Lorenz Messerer\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eContemporary green full leather, with warped boards, scratches and losses along the edges, especially at the corners. Endpapers missing. Scribbles to the pastedowns. Ex-libris Friedrich von Bassermann-Jordan, wine historian. The printed text block is soiled and browned; the edges show signs of heavy use. Paper loss at pp. 111-112, affecting the first three lines of text. The manuscript leaves are generally sound and less browned, except for the final verso. There are signs that some manuscript leaves have been removed at the end. A heavily worn but rare and significant copy. Fair.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eExceptionally 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.\u003cbr\u003e\nAt 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.\u003cbr\u003e\nIn 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eTaken as a whole, the \"Jahr-Buch\" is a printed Franconian wine and grain chronicle useful for local record; today it reads as an unusually rich primary source for Franconian viticulture, historical climatology, agricultural and commodity history, and the social history of the region.\u003cbr\u003e\nThe book begins in antiquity, with the vintage of 126 BC cited to Pliny and Funccius, before settling into an \"Anno Christi\" sequence running from AD 312 to Häulen's own time in 1742. Year after year, wine provides one of the principal measures of history. Prices are recorded by \"Eymer\", \"Fuder\", and \"Mass\"; grain prices later appear by the \"Malter Korn\"; values move between Batzen, Kreuzer, and Gulden. Most entries are followed by a \"Geschicht\" (History) rubric. The result is wonderfully indiscriminate in the best sense: economic history, weather observation, local memory, and the marvelous sit comfortably beside one another. In 593 there is a \"Drach grosser in Rom\" (a great dragon in Rome); the enormous vintage of 1296 produces a \"Fässer-Mangel\", a shortage of casks; in 1373 comes \"Veits-Tanz\", the phenomenon of dancing mania; 1382 is remembered simply as the \"Jahr ohne Wind\", the year without wind. In 1426 wine was so cheap that a \"Fuder\" could be bought for two florins \"mit samt dem Faß\", cask included, effectively leaving the barrel worth more than its contents.\u003cbr\u003e\nSome entries move still further into the territory where meteorology, marvel, and collective memory become difficult to separate. The year 1456 brings \"Fleisch- und Blut-Regen\", a rain of flesh and blood. In 1531, at Kitzingen, there was supposedly such an abundance of wine that they \"allda mit Wein gemahlen\": milled with wine, using it in place of water. Then comes 1540, the extraordinary heat-and-drought vintage, remembered here as producing \"Wein, der rareste in diesem Seculo\" (the rarest wine in this century). Elsewhere the chronicle catches sudden catastrophe: in 1659 the \"Pulver-Hauß zu Delfft fleucht in die Lufft\", the Delft powder-house flies into the air, an apparent recollection of the Delft Thunderclap, though entered several years later than its generally accepted date of 1654.\u003cbr\u003e\nAs the chronology approaches Häulen's own lifetime, this distant historical compilation increasingly becomes local memory. The closing printed \"Supplementum\" concentrates on Mainbernheim and its surroundings, recording plague mortality, the sack of Marckbreit, local wine prices, and the 1729 \"Huldigung\" (tribute) for Baron von Seckendorff. The movement is almost imperceptible: what begins with Pliny, ancient vintages, dragons, prodigies, and medieval chronicles gradually arrives at the prices, weather, deaths, ceremonies, and harvests of Häulen's own community.\u003cbr\u003e\nAnd the book was designed not to end there. The manuscript continuation at the rear takes up the printed chronology in German cursive Kurrentschrift and carries it forward into the 1750s. Here the boundary between public and private history becomes even thinner, in alignment with Häulen's conception of the book: history beginning in antiquity, narrowing gradually toward Franconia and Mainbernheim, and finally arriving inside the reader's own house.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWine, weather, dragons, dancing mania, and a year when the barrel cost more than the wine inside it. The author invited his readers to carry the chronicle forward, and someone took him up on it, continuing the entries by hand in 22 additional pages. What begins with Pliny and the vintage of 126 BC narrows to Franconia, then to Mainbernheim's own prices and deaths, and finally to the household that owned the book.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"La Fenice Antiquaria","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49385892741355,"sku":"157-1743--2500.00-237.00-2026","price":2500.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0766\/2000\/5611\/files\/00157_IMG_8834.jpg?v=1788991512"},{"product_id":"nemety-versuch-einer-darstellung-1835","title":"Versuch einer Darstellung der Lage und Ausdehnung des Hegyallyaer Weingebirges","description":"\u003cp\u003e1835 First Edition\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn 8vo. Pp. [1] f.e., 102, [2] blank, [1] r.e.\u003cbr\u003e\nWien (Vienna)\u003cbr\u003e\nFr. Beck's Universitäts Buchhandlung\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e19th century half-cloth binding; printed paper label to the spine that appears to be taken from the original wrappers. 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. Ink stamp to the title page with same provenance. Very limited foxing. Fine\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEarly nineteenth-century systematic account of Tokaj, written by Joseph Némety as an organizer of practical regional wine knowledge rather than as a celebrant of a famous name. At the time, wine districts were increasingly described through topography, archival record, and agricultural observation; Némety instead gives Hegyalja the form of a viticultural landscape, relating communes, soils, exposures, varieties, and cellar practice to the production of Tokayer Ausbruch. The wine already carried a learned reputation: Franz Forgách called it \"vinum nobilissimum atque praestantissimum\" and Hermann Conring named it \"vinum generossissimum.\" Némety's contribution is to bring that reputation under documentary and technical description, including the chronology of botrytised berry selection and vineyard labor. The book is a historical and practical treatise on the Hegyallya wine region and the cultivation, preparation, and treatment of Tokaji Ausbruch.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe volume opens by defining the Hegyallya district through its wine communes, naming Tokay, Zambor, Tállya, and related places before turning to soils, exposures, and vineyard parcels. It then describes the cultivated grape varieties and the preparation and treatment of Tokayer Ausbruch. The historical section traces the emergence of Ausbruch through parliamentary records of 1655 and urbaria (feudal land registers or property records), arguing that the separate gathering of botrytised berries was not practiced before that point. Némety also treats the labor term \"trina fossio\" and connects its triple working of the vines with usage after 1560, quoting the phrase \"separataque selectione, uvae passae\" (separate selection of dried berries). The Anmerkungen (Notes) move through Claudian on the vine-clad Ister, Sextus Aurelius Victor on Pannonian vineyards, the Anonymous Notary of King Béla, and Hungarian historians including Szirmay, Wagner, Kaprinay, and Forgách. The closing observations place Habsburg wine production at 36 to 40 million buckets annually and record the presentation of 300 Hungarian wine varieties at Maria Theresia's court.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEarly documentary wine history, uncommon in 1835, with a specifically narrow purpose: Hegyalja, its vineyards, and the making of Tokaji Aszú, one of Europe's most celebrated wines. We like books that catch a great wine before modern oenology and standardized its language, taking us from the wine mountain into the cellar and how this wine was made circa 1830.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"La Fenice Antiquaria","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49385893003499,"sku":"163-1835--500.00-290.00-2026","price":500.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0766\/2000\/5611\/files\/00163_IMG_8898.jpg?v=1788991911"},{"product_id":"bronner-die-verbesserung-des-1830","title":"Die Verbesserung des Weinbaues durch praktische Anweisung den Rießling ohne Pfähle und Latten","description":"\u003cp\u003e1830 First Edition\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn 8vo. Pp. [1] f.e., XII, 77, [], [1] folding plate, [1] r.e.\u003cbr\u003e\nHeidelberg\u003cbr\u003e\nC. F. Winter\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e19th century half-cloth binding; manuscript paper label to the spine. 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. Reinforced when bound, with a small loss to the inner margin of the first few leaves. Title page heavily browned, the remainder lightly foxed. Folding plate with light foxing. Good.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFirst 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.\u003cbr\u003e\nWhat 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe title page announces \"Mit 11 Abbildungen\" (with 11 illustrations - all collected in one folded plate), and Bronner's preface, signed at Wiesloch on 24 July 1830, immediately declares improved vine training a \"Bedürfniß der Zeit\" (need of the time). His complaint is economic as much as agricultural: when markets readily paid for inferior wine, growers had little reason to change. Better viticulture begins when better wine becomes worth making.\u003cbr\u003e\nThe numbered sections move from argument to experiment. \"Zweck und Nutzen der niederen Erziehungsart\" (purpose and advantages of low vine training) makes the case for cultivation without stakes and singles out Riesling as \"die edelste der Rebsorten\" (the noblest of grape varieties), weighing the new system against established practices such as the Bechtheim method. \"Der Rebsatz\" (planting the vineyard) follows the vine from selection and soil preparation through planting, winter earthing, yield, and, unusually, a year-by-year account of Bronner's \"Bockschnitt\" (bush-pruning system) from the first season through the sixth.\u003cbr\u003e\nThe final section, \"Traubenspaliere mit Winkelschnitt\" (grape espaliers trained by angle pruning), moves from the vineyard toward the house. Bronner sets out his \"Winkelschnitt\" (angle-pruning system), contrasts it with the \"fächerförmige\" (fan-shaped) method, and engages with Metzger's \"Rheinischer Weinbau\" (Rhenish Viticulture). The large folding plate by Th. Hengstenberg gathers the argument into eleven numbered figures, progressing from young vines through increasingly elaborate espalier forms.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eBefore single-grape monographs were fashionable, Bronner writes Riesling a love letter: low-trained, near today's regenerative bush-vine enthusiasms, and two centuries early.\u003cbr\u003e\nAn apothecary becomes a winegrower, plants Riesling, and decides the way everyone trains it can be improved. We like the combination of specificity and experiment: one grape, one vineyard problem, eleven illustrations, and a practical system worked out vine by vine.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"La Fenice Antiquaria","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49385894314219,"sku":"167-1830--550.00-258.00-2026","price":550.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0766\/2000\/5611\/files\/00167_IMG_8965.jpg?v=1788992611"},{"product_id":"sguario-dissertazione-sopra-le-1738","title":"Dissertazione sopra le aurore boreali","description":"\u003cp\u003e1738 First Edition\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn 4to. Pp. [1] f.e., 119, [1]; [1] folding illustration; [1] table; II plates.\u003cbr\u003e\nVenezia (Venice)\u003cbr\u003e\nPietro Bassaglia\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eVellum binding, soiled and stained; red offset stain to the back cover. Spine rubbed, showing an earlier vellum binding beneath, indicating that the volume has been rebound at an early date. Water stain at the front and rear endpapers; early restoration to the front one. Very well-executed and marginal restorations to the title page (visible only against a light source). Bottom margin slightly chipped at the central gatherings; small and very well-executed restorations. Despite this, overall internally handsome. Very good.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe work opens with the author's candid address to the reader, in which Sguario states that his theory is presented as probable and likely, rather than demonstrated, and that he was only at the beginning of his fifth lustrum (so about twenty-five years of age), and the treatise was completed in approximately thirty days.\u003cbr\u003e\nThe book is illustrated with a particularly striking large folding engraved plate depicting the aurora over Venice, showing rays and luminous columns rising above the horizon; curiously, the references to the \"second\" and \"third\" hours of the night follow the Venetian system of timekeeping, counting the hours from nightfall rather than from midnight. It is complete with 2 tables of geometrical demonstrations supporting the author's optical theory.\u003cbr\u003e\nThe dissertation begins with a survey of the history and geography of the aurora, collecting reports from across Europe, including the observations at Brévillepont in 1726 and 1731 and the Venetian display of 1737. Sguario reviews the regions in which the phenomenon might be observed and reproduces, with corrections, the engraved \"Tavola delle Aurore Boreali del Sig. de Mairan\".\u003cbr\u003e\nRejecting both the ancient and contemporary theory that the aurora resulted from combustible vapors or subterranean fires, Sguario proposes a distinctly Newtonian explanation, attributing the phenomenon to the reflection and refraction of sunlight in a lofty atmospheric cloud identified with the zodiacal light, or solar atmosphere. His argument draws upon planetary attraction, cometary atmospheres, the mechanics of rarefied matter, and the geometry of parabolic and hyperbolic motion, illustrated by detailed mathematical diagrams.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eAuroras are rare enough on their own. At this latitude, over Venice, they're improbable to the point of disbelief. Yet it happened, and this book, with its almost supernatural black-and-white engraving of luminous rays dancing above the lagoon, tries to bring us there. Sguario was all science and optics, but can you imagine the magic?\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"La Fenice Antiquaria","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49385894478059,"sku":"171-1738--1800.00-650.00-2026","price":1800.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0766\/2000\/5611\/files\/00171_IMG_0437.jpg?v=1788993006"},{"product_id":"argentero-di-bersezio-il-dilettante-1795","title":"Il dilettante de' cavalli","description":"\u003cp\u003e1795 Second Edition\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn 12mo. Pp. [1] f.e., 237, IV folding plates, [1] r.e.\u003cbr\u003e\nVenezia (Venice)\u003cbr\u003e\nPresso il Martini\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eContemporary half-leather binding with marbled paper boards; manuscript label to the spine, slightly rubbed. Some scattered light foxing and browning, especially in the first part of the volume. Tears with minor loss to the margins not affecting text at pp. 21 and 149; at p. 179 touching one line of text. Folding plates in very good condition. A genuine copy, very good.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn 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.\u003cbr\u003e\nThe 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe little book opens with a title page framed by a decorative typographical woodcut border, and featuring a woodcut vignette of horses in a rural landscape, executed in a rather naïve and charming style.\u003cbr\u003e\nAfter surveying eleven \"articles\" on horse husbandry, equine science, and veterinary practice (together providing a broad overview of contemporary equestrian knowledge, from choosing the right animals to diseases and shoeing) the book moves to the \"Saggio sopra le Razze de' Cavalli\" (p. 77, Essay on Horse Breeds), which includes an analytical examination of the tricks employed by horse dealers (\"Furberie de' Sensali\") and offers advice on protection against fraud. This is followed by the \"Trattato della Meccanica del Morso\" (p. 139), a treatise on the mechanics and action of the bit, and by several other specific chapters intended to assist in the practical management of a stable. Authorities cited include Buffon, the Duke of Newcastle, and a farrier of the French royal stables.\u003cbr\u003e\nIn addition to the woodcut title vignette, the volume is decorated with woodcut head-pieces in the same naïve and charming manner. Their distinctly popular style appears somewhat old-fashioned for an eighteenth-century book and contrasts strikingly with the four folding copperplates, executed in a much more accomplished and technically precise manner. These illustrate the anatomical parts of the horse; jaws and teeth according to age, together with the lower leg and hoof; bits and parts of the bridle; and, finally, a large folding view of a stable interior.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe charm of contradictions: naive woodcuts that would not look out of place in a village almanac, bound alongside four folding copperplates of anatomy, teeth, bits and a stable interior, drawn by a hand that clearly knew what it was doing. And a cavalry general who found military teaching inadequate, and dedicated personal resources to improve his knowledge.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"La Fenice Antiquaria","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49385894543595,"sku":"173-1795--650.00-350.00-2026","price":650.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0766\/2000\/5611\/files\/00173_IMG_0367.jpg?v=1788993135"},{"product_id":"fabbroni-dellarte-di-fare-il-vino-1787","title":"Dell'arte di fare il vino","description":"\u003cp\u003e1787 First Edition\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn 8vo. Pp. [1] f.e., 264, [1] folded plate, [1] r.e.\u003cbr\u003e\nFirenze (Florence)\u003cbr\u003e\nGiuseppe Tofani e Comp.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eHalf plain vellum, over spattered boards. Remains of a torn label at spine. Bumped corners. Signs of a torn ex libris at the front blue paper wrapper; stamp \"Legatoria di Libri - Massimiliano Scacci - Repubblica di San Marino\". Minimal marginal damp stain in the top early pages, not affecting text. The title page carries an ink stamp. Pp. 126 and 127 misnumbered 226 and 227. A sound copy, complete with its folding plate. Fine.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFabbroni'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.\u003cbr\u003e\nThis 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.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe argument is arranged in four parts, opening with a preliminary leaf bearing an epigraph from Helvetius in French - \"To attain certain ideas one must meditate: is everyone capable of it? Yes, when a powerful interest animates the soul\" - ahead of Fabbroni's own preface, in which he recounts working against the Academy's deadline, seizing a late vintage to redo his trials.\u003cbr\u003e\nParte Prima develops Fabbroni's physical theory of vinous fermentation. It opens with a notomia of the grape, conceived as a conglobate gland whose separate tissues contain gummy juice, sugar-bearing pulp, acid, coloring matter, and a flour-like materia vegeto-animale. Fermentation begins when these compartments rupture and sugar and acid meet, requiring heat but not free contact with air; Fabbroni expresses the process through a Bergman-style table of elective affinities. Comparative tables analyze some two dozen wines, from Alicante and Champagne to Tokay, Jerez, and the Rhine, alongside Priestley's observations on the air contained in Madeira, Port, Hock, Claret, Tokay, Champagne, and cider. Further tables compare must with finished wine and calibrate Fabbroni's areometer for sugar concentration. Finally, he tests his theory by constructing an artificial must from its supposed constituent parts and, after six days' fermentation, obtains a passable cider-like drink.\u003cbr\u003e\nParte Seconda turns this chemistry into a practical method for judging must, expressly adapted to the limited technical knowledge of country people. Fabbroni considers the soil and situation of the vineyard and the character of the grape, then proposes simple tests of the must itself: an areometer measures the proportion of sugar to water; evaporation reveals tartar through the crystals deposited; spontaneous settling indicates the quantity of feculent matter; and the alkali required to neutralize the must measures its free acid. Taken together, these observations provide a practical criterion for deciding the good or bad qualities of the fermentable liquor.\u003cbr\u003e\nParte Terza turns diagnosis into practice. Discussing concentrated must, Fabbroni recounts a rabbinic legend in which Noah bargains with the Devil over the stolen vine, eventually conceding him two thirds - hence, Fabbroni suggests, the ancient practice of boiling must down by two thirds. On excess tartar, a second table of elective affinities explains the action of gypsum on tartar, placing the plastering of wines on a chemical rather than merely empirical footing.\u003cbr\u003e\nParte Quarta treats winemaking, drawing wine from the vat, its alterations, keeping, and the qualities of good wine. It opens with a lively argument for the relativity of taste, moving from Strabo, Pliny, Juvenal, and Livia to Florentine Verdea and contrasting French and Italian preferences: taste varies with age, nation, and even sex, while generosity and keeping remain essential qualities. Fabbroni finally challenges Rozier's claim that every wine contains the causes of its own destruction: \"with this estimable author's good leave, I cannot share his view, if he means it generally.\"\u003cbr\u003e\nThe apparatus is dense and cosmopolitan: Crescenzio, Baccio, Alstedio, Prefetti, Soderini, Davanzati, Bertoli, Trinci, Villifranchi, Paoletti, and la Valle among the older and Tuscan authorities; among the moderns Rozier - whose Bordeaux dissertation Fabbroni anticipates being accused of plagiarizing, and rebuts, alongside a similar charge touching Villifranchi - Bertholon, the Marchese di Bouillon, Meunier of Limoges, and Padre Landi, crowned at Mantua; Ecclesiastes quoted in Latin, and a Greek gloss on cider and perry in the footnotes. A closing leaf carries the printer's own address to the reader, praising Fabbroni's geometric method, his refusal to advance anything unconfirmed by experiment, and his plain style; an errata leaf follows, in which Fabbroni apologizes for the haste of composition and adds one further recollected experiment, a fermentation trial carried out in a near-perfect vacuum.\u003cbr\u003e\nThe folding plate gives thirteen figures: the anatomy of the berry, an areometer of thin metal foil surmounted by a small thermometer, a graduated cylindrical vessel, sectioned furnaces for warming the must, an oenometer, and two casks fitted with bellows and a leather conduit so wine may be racked without splashing.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eA treatise arguing on every register at once: chemistry and home-brewed experiment, ancient authorities and practical winemaking, comparative tasting and a public quarrel with Rozier - all built toward a fermentation theory mocked in 1787 and vindicated a century later. Even president Jefferson found it worth a personal reply.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"La Fenice Antiquaria","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49385894641899,"sku":"176-1787--1850.00-817.00-2026","price":1850.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0766\/2000\/5611\/files\/00176_IMG_0164.jpg?v=1788993270"},{"product_id":"barla-iconographie-des-orchidees-1868","title":"Iconographie des Orchidées","description":"\u003cp\u003e1868 First Edition\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn Folio. Pp. [1] f.e., [8], 83, [3], 63 plates\u003cbr\u003e\nNice\u003cbr\u003e\nImprimerie Caisson et Mignon\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eContemporary green cloth over marbled paper boards; spine lettered in gilt. General rubbing to marbled boards, especially at the corners. An ink presentation inscription on the half-title. Blind stamp at the bottom of the first three plates \"Colorié par M.me Lemaitre\". A beautiful copy in an unassuming binding. Fine.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe 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.\u003cbr\u003e\nBarla 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.\u003cbr\u003e\nVincent 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.\u003cbr\u003e\nThis 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.\u003cbr\u003e\nThe 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.\u003cbr\u003e\nNice 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn his preface, Barla explains what drew him specifically to the Alpes-Maritimes: within an unusually narrow stretch of coast and mountains, the region brings together plant life otherwise scattered across much of Europe. Mediterranean orchids grow wild in its coastal hills and valleys, alpine species take over at higher elevations, and Barla remarks that nearly every orchid native to France, Italy, Germany, and the neighboring regions can be found somewhere within this single territory.\u003cbr\u003e\nThe work is a systematic account of the wild orchids of Nice and the Alpes-Maritimes, organized by tribe and genus according to the classification adopted by Lindley, Endlicher, and Reichenbach fil. Each species entry combines an extensive international synonymy with a French morphological description and records of the plant's local stations and flowering season.\u003cbr\u003e\nThe tribe Arétusées opens the systematic text with the genus Limodorum Tourn., whose generic characters are given in full: monandrous flowers, a free and operculate terminal anther, powdery or granular pollen masses, and a unilocular, three-valved capsule. The first species, Limodorum abortivum Swartz, is cited to Tournefort, Linnaeus, Swartz, Reichenbach fil., Grenier and Godron, Parlatore, Boissier, Koch, Gussone, Bertoloni, and Ardoino's own Flore analytique du département des Alpes-Maritimes, and is described as bearing four to twenty large, strikingly colored flowers, violet shaded with yellow. The volume proceeds in this manner through a further 62 species, with abundant detail and careful observation.\u003cbr\u003e\nThe beautiful plates completing the volume combine a colored study of the full habit of each plant with a numbered array of dissected floral and anatomical details; the finer analytical figures are left uncolored, and each species is rendered at natural size rather than reduced to fit the page. On many plates, traces of fine hand-finishing are visible over the colored lithographs.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eSurely Barla's fungi could have entered a beauty contest, but his orchids would have made the podium: sixty-three plates, drawn from life and delicately hand-retouched, with every petal and spur gorgeous enough to prove it.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"La Fenice Antiquaria","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49385895362795,"sku":"187-1868--3500.00-1335.00-2026","price":3500.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0766\/2000\/5611\/files\/00187_IMG_0475.jpg?v=1788993975"},{"product_id":"traite-d-equitation-1778","title":"Traité d'équitation","description":"\u003cp\u003e1778 First Edition\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn 4to. Pp. [2] f.e., xvi, 198, v, [1], IX folding plates, [2] r.e.\u003cbr\u003e\nParis\u003cbr\u003e\nImprimerie Royale\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eNineteenth-century black morocco; spine with five raised bands, gilt ruling, and author, title, and date gilt-lettered. Light rubbing to corners and spine edges. Red edges. Marbled pastedowns within a refined gilt-ruled border; small bookseller's label of Libraire Fl. Tulkens, Bruxelles, to the front pastedown. Scattered foxing, most noticeable at the beginning of the volume, with occasional light pencil underlining throughout. Plates complete and clean. Fine.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFirst, 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.\u003cbr\u003e\nThe 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe treatise is divided into two principal parts, the instruction of the rider, and the instruction of the horse. The first progresses from correct seat and posture and the coordinated use of the aids to the principal movements and exercises of the classical manège, concluding with instruction on jumpers and mounted martial exercises.\u003cbr\u003e\nThe second concerns the training of the horse, from elementary work on the longe and under saddle to more advanced schooling, including straightening, work with the bit, passage, work at the pillars, elevated movements, and the development of balance on the haunches. Particular attention is given to correcting physical limitations, resistance, and acquired faults. The work concludes with the training appropriate to horses intended for different military, sporting, and carriage uses, followed by an alphabetical glossary of the principal terminology of classical horsemanship, including the natural gaits and the low and elevated airs.\u003cbr\u003e\nThe nine folding plates engraved by La Gardette illustrate manège floor plans for straight work along the wall, passing the corner, doubling, the volte, changes of hand on the haunches and shoulders, the figure-eight, and work at the pillars. The final plate depicts mounted ring-tilting and head-tilting courses, including a lance thrust at the figure called the tête de Méduse and a pistol shot at the tête du More.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eA school that taught through practice rather than books, and finally the one master who decided to write its doctrine down. But he died before it went to print and - suspense! - his brother took care of the manuscript, allowing us to enjoy it centuries later. We especially like the nine folding plates: technical diagrams of the manège in which the horse itself disappears, leaving only its path across the floor; by this we really mean the cute little traces of its hoofprints. They are beautiful (and a little funny) as abstractions, but what gets us is how strangely legible they remain: nearly 250 years later, without being an eighteenth-century écuyer, you can still follow the horse around the room.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"La Fenice Antiquaria","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49385895493867,"sku":"188-1778--1200.00-523.60-2026","price":1200.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0766\/2000\/5611\/files\/00188_IMG_0421.jpg?v=1788994052"},{"product_id":"marie-isabelle-dressage-par-le-1858","title":"Dressage par le surfaix-cavalier des chevaux de cavalerie, d'attelage et de course en six et douze leçons","description":"\u003cp\u003e1858 Second Edition\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn 8vo. Pp. [1] f.e., [10], 284, [4], [8] plates, [1] r.e.\u003cbr\u003e\nParis\u003cbr\u003e\nHenri Plon; J. Dumaine\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e20th-century half calf over marbled paper boards; five raised bands at the spine, with gilt lettering. Moderate rubbing at the corners. Marbled pastedowns; two ex-libris on the front pastedown, both associated with Paul Couturier de Royas. Usual edition irregularity in pagination, jumping from p. 80 to p. 118 (with seven unnumbered leaves between), confirmed against digitized copies. Very clean, with no foxing. Fine.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eSecond 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.\u003cbr\u003e\nThis 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe book moves from the horse's foundational training under saddle, in harness, and at the gallop, through chapters correcting particular faults, into a long sequence of individual lessons that carries the surfaix-cavalier method from its earliest aids (the crop, lunge whip, and spur) to the full repertoire expected of a trained cavalry mount. By the fifth lesson, the horse is introduced to drum, pistol, music, and sabre, alongside pirouettes, two-track work, rein-back, and work at the spur.\u003cbr\u003e\nThe section on training racehorses sets out a detailed regimen: eight days of two-hour morning and evening walks before faster work begins, a snaffle bridle and exercise sheet, and a graduated program of trotting and cantering. It includes a pointed passage on stable safety, insisting that a young thoroughbred be ridden only by a very light, gentle-tempered rider and warning at length against allowing the boys exercising racehorses to play with the colts, attributing the resulting danger to the animal's own playfulness rather than vice.\u003cbr\u003e\nEight lithographed illustrations accompany the text: an equestrian portrait of the author, sidesaddle, in riding habit and top hat, astride a piaffing horse, serving as the frontispiece; a plate of six horses shown fitted with the \"surfaix-cavalier\" apparatus from different angles; a plate of a two-horse carriage with its driver; and a diagram plate showing the harness fitted to a horse alongside a dressage crop and a vignette of a groom leading a horse, accompanying a table of rein settings for the twelve lessons of stable training.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWe are big fans of interesting, eclectic lives, especially when they belong to women who found their way into places not particularly designed to admit them. Marie-Isabelle began fitting hats in a Paris shop, not horses in a manège. By 1858 she had trained horses entrusted to her by Emperor Nicholas I himself and become the first woman to publish her own method for training both horse and rider. Where the era's other écuyers wrote from a single court or riding school, she arrived at hers by way of Vienna, Saint Petersburg, and an English cavalry barracks. We would gladly have been among her pupils, sabre drill included.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"La Fenice Antiquaria","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49385895592171,"sku":"189-1858--550.00-265.00-2026","price":550.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0766\/2000\/5611\/files\/00189_IMG_0446.jpg?v=1788994175"},{"product_id":"joubert-de-l-hiberderie-le-1765","title":"Le Dessinateur, pour les fabriques d'etoffes d'or, d'argent et de soie","description":"\u003cp\u003e1765 First Edition\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn 8vo. Pp. [2] f.e., xlviii, 218, [6], [2] r.e.\u003cbr\u003e\nParis\u003cbr\u003e\nSebastien Jorry; Bauche; Brocas\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eContemporary full calf, gilt fillets with floral cornerpieces to the boards; spine with gilt-ruled compartments and gilt-lettered leather label; all edges gilt. Binding worn, particularly at the spine, which is darkened with a chipped head. Front board a little weak but not loose. Pastedowns and free endpapers of beautiful, delicate block-printed paper with a gilt checkered pattern on a pink ground; silk page-marker detached but present. A light pencil drawing of a face to the verso of the second front free endpaper. Some pages misnumbered (xxxv, 129-144, 131, 36). Fine decorative engraving opening the \"Épître\"; woodcut head- and tailpieces, together with five woodcut textile diagrams. A sound and attractive copy of a trade manual. Very good.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFirst 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eA historical and philosophical preface opens the work, tracing the development of Lyon's silk-design trade through its leading practitioners, foremost among them Jean Revel, and offering practical advice to parents on recognizing artistic aptitude worth cultivating in a child. Fourteen numbered chapters follow, each devoted to a named category of patterned silk: a remarkably detailed catalogue of luxury fabrics, from satin, damask, taffeta, and velvet to figured and brocaded textiles woven with gold and silver thread.\u003cbr\u003e\nThe fourteenth and longest chapter is devoted to moires, the watered silks that were Joubert's own specialty. Five woodcut figures show point-repeat and comber-repeat arrangements for brocaded moire, including diagrams distinguishing designs worked \"à pointe\" from those worked \"à chemin,\" and a four-part floral silk pattern intended for a moire five-thirds of an ell wide. The illustrations are technical rather than decorative: they translate the designer's repeat into a form that could be understood in relation to the loom.\u003cbr\u003e\nA fifteenth chapter, \"Le Voyage de Paris,\" takes the young designer out of the workshop and through the capital, directing him toward its sights, shops, collections, and artistic resources as part of his professional education.\u003cbr\u003e\nThe volume closes with Joubert's translation of six \"tables raisonnées\" from Pellegrino Antonio Orlandi's \"Abecedario pittorico,\" taken from the enlarged Naples edition of 1733, which was dedicated to the painter Francesco Solimena. The section expands the silk designer's education into the fine arts, combining a bibliography of works on architecture and perspective with practical instruction and a canon of Old Masters. Particular artists are recommended for particular qualities worth studying: Correggio for softness, Raphael for grace and contour, Titian for composition, Veronese for invention, Claude Lorrain for landscape, and Michelangelo and Bernini for modeling.\u003cbr\u003e\nThroughout the book Joubert invokes the authority of men within both the Lyon textile industry and the Parisian art world: the silk manufacturer and Deputy of Commerce Louis Pernon, designer and manufacturer Jean-Victor Geneve, and veteran designer Pierre Ringuet, alongside the King's engraver Charles-Nicolas Cochin and the painter Jean-Jacques Bachelier. The result is an unusual record of a profession at the moment its guarded workshop knowledge began to become public knowledge.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eLyon had secrets worth stealing: its silk designers carried the knowledge of Europe's most coveted fabrics from workshop to workshop, and the guild wanted it kept that way. But, as in the best spy stories, our man Joubert put the trade into a book. The guild wanted the manuscript suppressed; he took it to Paris and printed it anyway: patterns, techniques, professional tricks, even the artists a young designer should study. Industrial espionage, eighteenth-century style - except the man leaking the secrets signed his name to the title page with pride.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"La Fenice Antiquaria","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49385896935659,"sku":"191-1765--2500.00-647.36-2026","price":2500.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0766\/2000\/5611\/files\/00191_IMG_0394.jpg?v=1788994340"},{"product_id":"forsyth-a-treatise-on-the-culture-1803","title":"A Treatise on the Culture and Management of Fruit Trees","description":"\u003cp\u003e1803 Second American Edition\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn 8vo. Pp. [4] f.e., xii, 13-280, XIII plates, [4] r.e.\u003cbr\u003e\nAlbany\u003cbr\u003e\nD. \u0026amp; S. Whiting\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eContemporary full calf, with gilt-lettered label at the spine. Corners bumped; head of the spine chipped, with some wear at the hinges. Top corners of pp. 221 and 223 torn, with no loss of text. Light foxing throughout, heavier on the plates. A sound copy. Very good.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eSecond edition of William Forsyth's wound-dressing composition for fruit and forest trees, which was significant enough in its day to be examined by Parliament and used on Royal Navy timber during the Napoleonic Wars - genuine period stakes for what might otherwise read as a routine pruning manual.\u003cbr\u003e\nThis Albany edition is the second American, following the Philadelphia one of one year prior. William Cobbett supplied the introduction and notes adapting Forsyth's English rules for American climates, addressed as a personal letter to James Paul, Senior, of Bustleton, Pennsylvania, and written, Cobbett says, having withdrawn from the \"noise and strife\" of politics.\u003cbr\u003e\nThe transplantation of Forsyth's English horticulture to America is particularly interesting in the chapter on vines. Forsyth recommends a repertoire of classic European wine and dessert grapes (the Royal Muscadine (Chasselas Blanc), Malmsey Muscadine, Black Muscadine, July Grape, and others) all Vitis vinifera, cultivated in England against warm walls or in vineries. Cobbett's adaptation carried that advice across the Atlantic to growers for whom vinifera cultivation would prove notoriously difficult over the following century, as the eastern United States' climate, native pests, and diseases frustrated European varieties and encouraged increasing reliance on native and hybrid vines. Cobbett's own notes already engage with American uncertainty on the subject, correcting a belief he attributes to American growers that vines are short-lived by pointing to their evident longevity in Britain.\u003cbr\u003e\nDistinctive to this Albany printing is an eight-page letter from Peter W. Yates, dated September 1803, recounting his own experience grafting, inoculating, and pruning fruit trees according to Forsyth's methods since 1796. It provides an unusually appropriate conclusion to the American edition: an Albany grower's practical testimony bound directly into an English treatise already adapted by Cobbett for American conditions.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eForsyth's Treatise, first published in London in 1802, combines his celebrated and controversial wound-dressing composition for hollow and damaged fruit and forest trees with a new system of pruning and training. The text proceeds in numbered chapters through the orchard, treating individual fruits and their cultivation alongside practical problems of pruning, grafting, disease, and damaged wood.\u003cbr\u003e\nCobbett's \"Introduction\" occupies the front on the volume, while his \"Notes\" appear as footnotes scattered throughout the main text, intervening where English horticultural practice requires explanation or adaptation for American readers.\u003cbr\u003e\nSpecifically chapter VIII, \"Of Vines,\" covers the different sorts of vines cultivated in England, their propagation, training and pruning (including the application of Forsyth's composition), watering, protection of grapes from flies, wasps, and birds, and gathering and keeping grapes through winter. Named varieties include the July Grape (Morillon Noir Hatif), Royal Muscadine (also called D'Arboyce or Chasselas Blanc), Malmsey Muscadine, Black Muscadine, and White or Common Muscadine. Other chapters include \"Of Apricots\" and \"Of the Canker and Gum,\" each opening with a descriptive argument line.\u003cbr\u003e\nThirteen engraved plates illustrate the practical instruction, including the Apricot, Green Gage Plum, Duke Cherry, Standard Apple, St. Germain Pear, a vine-training plate, and a plate showing sixteen numbered pruning and grafting tools.\u003cbr\u003e\nA concluding Supplement is Forsyth's defense of his composition through named case studies. A hollow lime tree, its trunk decayed from top to bottom, had filled entirely with sound new wood fifteen years after treatment; an old elm, twice emptied of cart-loads of rotten wood, had grown twenty feet in six years; and an elm on Palace Green, headed twenty feet from the ground, produced a shoot forty-six feet high and nearly six feet in circumference.\u003cbr\u003e\nThe text proper is followed by Peter W. Yates's letter of September 1803, describing his experience since 1796 with grafting, inoculating, and pruning fruit trees according to Forsyth's methods.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWe love that this book crossed the Atlantic and kind of changed in the process: Cobbett began arguing with American assumptions in the footnotes, the Albany publishers added a local grower's testimonial, and Forsyth's European vines found themselves recommended to a country where vinifera would struggle for the next century.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"La Fenice Antiquaria","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49385897427179,"sku":"194-1803--400.00-136.00-2026","price":400.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0766\/2000\/5611\/files\/00194_IMG_0314.jpg?v=1788994454"},{"product_id":"sammelband-royal-oporto-wine-1824","title":"The Wine Question (1824)","description":"\u003cp\u003e1824 First Edition\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn 8vo. I. pp. [4], 65, 15. II. pp. [2], 5, [4], 40. III. pp. viii, 125. IV. pp. 24, [2].\u003cbr\u003e\nLondon; Porto\u003cbr\u003e\nWilson. Richardson. Booth. Ridgway\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e19th-century half brown calf over marbled boards; spine with four raised bands, a red morocco lettering-piece, and gilt decoration. The spine is rubbed and worn at the head and tail and along the joints; board margins rubbed as well. Front free endpaper loose, with a small archival-tape repair at the top partially securing it. The text block carries sparse pencil annotations. The title page of the first work bears an early ink ownership inscription at its head, reading \"Robt Cockburn - Leith.\" The binding bears the signs of a well-used working copy, but remains sound overall. Good.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eA 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.\u003cbr\u003e\nThe 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eI. The Wine Question Considered; or, Observations on the Pamphlets of Mr. James Warre \u0026amp; Mr. Fleetwood Williams, Respecting the General Company for the Agriculture of the Vineyards, on the Upper Douro, Known in England, under the Name of the Royal Oporto Wine Company (Anonymous, \"By a Portuguese\", 1824). Argues directly against Warre and Fleetwood Williams's published complaints about the Royal Oporto Wine Company, defending the Company's regulatory authority over demarcation, pricing, production, and blending on the Upper Douro. An appendix reprints a series of supporting documents: the first, headed \"No. I,\" is a translated circular letter the English factors at Oporto sent to their brokers on the Douro in September 1754 - a document the factors themselves called their \"New Instructions\" - together with the brokers' own answer to it, the two letters described as the origin of, and introduction to, the Wine Company's charter. Further documents follow in the same appendix, including the Douro wine brokers' own response to the circular.\u003cbr\u003e\nII. Report of the Proceedings of the London Association of Wine and Spirit Merchants, for the Year Ending 25th March, 1826. The London trade association's own annual report, printed by Charles Skipper, recording the Association's lobbying on behalf of the London wine and spirit trade. Particular attention falls on the Portuguese wine trade: the committee reports on negotiations between Britain and Portugal, cooperation with the London merchants trading with Oporto, and representations to the government over grievances arising from the Portuguese system. An appendix reproduces correspondence with the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the President of the Board of Trade, a memorial from Oporto merchants resident in London, and a notarized translation of an official edict published at Oporto.\u003cbr\u003e\nIII. James Warre, The Past, Present, \u0026amp; Probably the Future State of the Wine Trade; Proving that an Increase of Duty Caused a Decrease of Revenue; and a Decrease of Duty, an Increase of Revenue. Second Edition, with Supplementary Observations (1824). Founded on parliamentary and other authentic documents and addressed to the President and Members of the Board of Trade, the text argues that reducing wine duties increases Treasury revenue and raising them decreases it, opening with the epigraph \"Authority is sacred when Experience affords parallels and analogies,\" from D'Israeli on Predictions. Two extensive statistical appendices support the argument: Appendix B recapitulates British wine-duty rates and annual average consumption broken down by country of origin - Portugal, Spain, France, Madeira, the Rhineland, the Cape, and all other sources - across each period in which the duty changed; Appendix N tabulates British wine imports by country, year by year, from 1696 to 1785.\u003cbr\u003e\nIV. Plano para a Reforma da Companhia Geral da Agricultura das Vinhas do Alto Douro: Remettido ao Soberano Congresso Nacional, pela Junta da mesma Companhia (Porto, 1822). The Companhia's own proposed reform plan, submitted to the Portuguese Cortes Geraes. Opens with the Cortes's order of 1 September 1821 and the Secretaria de Estado's covering letter of 5 September 1821 directing the Company's Junta to be heard on the plan, followed by the Junta's own representation on an additional article to the draft decree, dated 5 January 1822. Closes with a further representation dated Porto, 19 January 1822, signed by seven members of the Junta: P. Francisco de Sousa Cirne de Madureira, Manoel de Albuquerque de Mello Pereira Caceres, Gaspar Cardoso de Carvalho e Fonseca, Joao Ribeiro de Faria, Braz d'Abreu Aranha e Araujo, Jose de Sousa e Mello, and Antonio Bernardo de Brito e Cunha.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eA Port wine trade war fought in print: British merchants against Portuguese protectionism, answered pamphlet for pamphlet, with duties, monopoly, free trade, and the quality of Port itself all at stake. Four works bound together while the argument was still raging.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"La Fenice Antiquaria","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49385897754859,"sku":"198-1824--1200.00-42.00-2026","price":1200.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0766\/2000\/5611\/files\/00198_IMG_0226.jpg?v=1788994625"}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0766\/2000\/5611\/collections\/NewsletterAsset_2.png?v=1792563900","url":"https:\/\/fenicebooks.com\/en-ap\/collections\/seattle-book-fair-highlights.oembed","provider":"La Fenice Antiquaria","version":"1.0","type":"link"}