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Extracts of some twenty works by the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, utopian, diplomat, academicien and economist, prophet of the League of Nations, best known for his Projet pour rendre la Paix perpetuelle en Europe, 1713-17. 'Some of his other schemes called for the inauguration of political, economic and demographical statistics; the establishment of an official press; the reformation of taxation by the institution of a tax graduated according to income or, as he proposed in another project, according to capital; the suppression of begging; the improvement of the judicial system; the building of roads; the creation of a system of public instruction; the vocational and professional training of children; the elimination of most of the inequalities between the sexes in matters of education; and certain advanced innovations in pedagogical method' (Palgrave III, 345).
This selection of his works, selected and edited by Pons-Augustin Alletz, includes essays on population, social welfare, hospitals, child care, finance, commerce and education. 'The works of this 'homme de bien', as he was called in his time, are rare and difficult to collect' (ibid).

The first edition of this work was published by Maradan in 1804, although it had been serialised in the Bibliothèque des Romans and parts of it had been pirated and printed in various journals. It was enormously popular and ran to several editions. A continuation was published, also by Maradan, under the title Suite des Souvenirs de Félicie, Paris 1807. With a dedication to Madame de Genlis’ brother, the original preface to the 1804 edition in which she discusses the work’s early popularity and compares it to the Souvenirs of Madame de Caylus and of Madame Necker. It also includes the fictional introduction by the editor of the works of the late eponymous author.
‘Cet ouvrage superficiel et frivole n’est fait ni pour les penseurs ni pour les philosophes, mais il plaira peut-êtreà ceux qui aiment le naturel et la variété’ (Avertissement de l’Editeur des OEuvres posthumes de madame de L***, p. 11).

An attractive, unsophisticated copy of the first edition of ‘Lettre à un Amateur de la Peinture’ by Christian Ludwig von Hagedorn, one of the most important art historiographers of the Enlightenment. A diplomat and director of the royal picture collection in Dresden, Hagedorn also assembled a significant collection of paintings, which are described and offered for sale in this work. Hagedorn’s ‘Lettre’, which occupies the first twenty pages, is followed by ‘Eclaircissemens historiques’, by Franz Christoph Janneck, the Austrian painter known for his paintings of festive gatherings who was much admired by Hagedorn. Janneck provides a description of the works in Hagedorn’s private collection, along with a series of biographical sketches and anecdotal digressions about various other painters. Janneck provides a wealth of information about both greater and lesser artists: the index designates those painters represented in the collection as well as other artists discussed in the digressions. Those painters thought to feature for the first time in a volume about painting are marked with an asterisk.
The frontispiece is an etching by Pierre-Jules Hutin (ca. 1720-1763), notable for its inclusion of a female figure engaged in aesthetic debate. The engraving depicts an artist’s studio with two groups of figures deep in discussion. In the foreground is a painting of Leda and the Swan with three figures clustered around it. Standing immediately next to the painting is a woman intently discussing the painting with two male connoisseurs. The more elegant of the men is seated, the other man holds up a glass to the painting and the woman is holding either a pointer or a paint brush.

An attractive copy of one of the dozens of reprints of Montesquieu’s seminal work, published under the same fictional Cologne imprint as the first edition of 1721. This edition includes the full 150 letters, as in the original printing, rather than the 140 included in Montesquieu’s expurgated version. Not originally intended as a novel, it spawned so many imitations in the form of novels (Lettres juives, Lettres chinoises, Lettres d’une Péruvienne etc) that even Montesquieu realised he had started a vogue: ‘My Lettres persanes taught people to write letter-novels’ (Montesquieu’s Mes Pensées: no. 1621).

An attractive set of a scarce chivalric romance by Charles Joseph de Mayer, mostly remembered for his impressive Cabinet des fées, a forty-one volume collection of fairy tales published between 1785 and 1789. The present novel, intended as a continuation of Tressan’s version of Amadis de Gaul, published in 1779, follows the adventures of Lisvart, the son of the Emperor of Constantinople. In keeping with Mayer’s interest in the fairy tale, Lisvart de Grèce includes plenty of fantastical sequences alongside the chivalric. In a fascinating introduction, in which Mayer talks of his involvement with Tressan in the Bibliothèque universelle des romans and discusses the state of French literature, he advises readers to start by reading Tressan’s work before moving on to his continuation, to save confusion between the different characters and generations. He suggests that this is a good time to publish the romances of chivalry, to restore a little French colour into a literature that has of late been besieged by translations from the English and the German. Following the lead of Tressan, Mayer has also attempted to update the genre to make it more accessible to a contemporary audience.
‘J’ai cru devoir imiter le Comte de Tressan... supprimer, ajouter, créer, polir, substituer, arrondir, & rapprocher un peu de nos tems & de nos mœurs la scene ancienne & le vieux théâtre; briser enfin le verre d’un tableau de lanterne magique, pour faire des tableaux vrais & les portraits ressemblans... Je devrois peut-être faire observer que le moment de mettre en lumière les Romans de Chevalerie est plus favorable qu’on ne feroit tenté de le croire. Depuis quelques années, la France ne reçoit & ne lit que des traductions de Romans Anglois, & des fictions prises dans les Auteurs Allemands: il me semble que toutes nos couleurs soient épuisées... il paroît même que les teintes légeres réussiroient; car nos passions paroissent entierement purgées de cette maniere noire qui a marqué nos Romans’ (pp. vi-x).
The novel is accompanied by a sequence of twelve songs, which accompany the text on engraved plates in which both words and musical score are given. These are composed by Pierre-Jean Porro (1750-1831), the influential composer and guitarist. Following the novel are two short stories by Mayer, Amours de Guillaume de St.- Vallier, Troubadour, (V, 255-294) and Amours de Jeanne, Reine de Jérusalem, de Naples, de Sicile, Comtesse de Provence; Roman Historique, (V, 295-330).

A ‘shop of riddles’, this scarce volume of poetry includes three hundred and thirty-seven enigmatic poems or verse riddles on subjects as diverse as the moon, the game of chess, glasses (‘nous sommes deux soeurs de même âge’), carnivals, fables, the opera and a pearl necklace. A key to the solutions is found at the back of the work.

An exceptional copy of the second edition of this classic work on garden architecture. Lavishly illustrated with 190 hand-coloured plates, this copy is remarkably preserved in the original wrappers showing the 24 original instalments. A fresh, clean copy of the deluxe coloured version of this work.

First published by Allart in Amsterdam between 1802 and 1809, this is the first real theorisation of landscape gardening in the Netherlands, written by the gardener and garden designer Gijsbert Van Laar. Inspired by the English garden, it is addressed not to the wealthy nobility but to the middle classes, for whom it provided elegant and enjoyable, but cheaper, alternatives to the complex patterns of stately grounds: ‘For what is more suitable for the hard-working Dutchman than that he should have rest from his labours in the calm retreat of his garden’. Each instalment of the ‘Storehouse of Garden Ornaments’ provides two garden plans, usually graced with ponds, and scattered with letters marking bridges, pagodas, columns and other such ornaments, all illustrated in colour in the remaining plates.

‘Van Laar’s compendium distinguishes itself [...] from [...] earlier Dutch works by an unusual request to its readers in the preface to take part in the information-gathering and design process. Each reader is invited to send his own designs of garden plans and ornaments for discussion and publication so that an open exchange of ideas on garden art might develop to the benefit of all’ (Sellers, The Romantic Landscape, p.5).

An epistolary novel by Auguste Lafontaine, set in Russia in the early eighteenth century and translated by Isabelle de Montolieu, a writer strongly influenced by the German and English literature of the time. Lafontaine’s romantic fiction had a wide readership among women throughout Europe and was enormously popular in England. Summers lists some thirty titles published in English, in some cases in more than one version, many of which, including the present novel, were printed by the Minerva Press. The present novel, first published as Fedor und Marie in 1803, was translated as Dolgorucki and Menzikoff, A Russian Tale, London, Minerva Press, 1805 (see Blakey p. 214). There was also a three volume ‘Londres’ edition of this French translation, also 1804, but Cioranescu gives precedence to this Paris edition.

Scarce first edition of these false nun’s memoirs, purportedly written by herself, but in fact penned by a cleric, Pierre Charpentier de Longchamps, member of the Académie de la Rochelle. The novel is a tale brimming with intrigue in which the misfortunes and romantic adventures of a young girl are narrated with some gusto. At the end of it all, the heroine undergoes a conversion and becomes a nun.
It was later republished under the title La soeur Adélaïde, ses égaremens et ses vertus, ses foiblesses et son repentir, ouvrage posthume du plus éloquent écrivain de ce siècle, ‘Au Paraclet’, 1785. The reference to the ‘plus éloquent écrivain de ce siècle’ on the title page was intended to pass the work off as if by Rousseau, no doubt to cash in on his saleability (see Barbier IV 508, 'on a voulu passer cet ouvrage comme etant de J.J. Rousseau').
A previous owner has made the following observation in a neat hand: ‘il est assez singulier qu’un ecclésiastique, l’abbé de Longchamps, membre de l’Académie de la Rochelle, ait composé, avec un soin complaisant, ce roman d’amour, dont quelques tableaux sont d’une grande nudité’.

The first and most famous of Brantôme’s Mémoires, this volume includes the outspoken Vies des Dames Illustres. Written after his retirement from public life in 1589, Brantôme had left instructions that his Mémoires should be published, but it was not until 1665 that this first volume appeared. Written in a frank, conversational manner, Brantôme describes his years at the centre of the glittering court and gives detailed and highly personal accounts of his contemporaries. His accounts give a highly colourful picture of court life and his descriptions of the sex lives of the ladies of the court are striking because of his ability to present graphic detail in a straightforward and almost bland style, as if he were talking about the weather.

A light-hearted sentimental novel set in diplomatic circles in Brussels and the Hague. The author, an officer in the cavalry, was a popular novelist ‘connu comme littérateur dans le genre léger où il a fait preuve d’un certain esprit’ (DLF). Desboulmiers, as he was known, also had an interest in the theatre and a broad knowledge of its history. His two most important works on theatre history, Histoire anecdotique et raisonnée du théâtre italien, Paris 1769 and Histoire du théâtre de l’Opéra-Comique, Paris 1769, are still consulted today.
This is one of three novels first published in 1766 by Desboulmiers, the others being De tout un peu ou les amusements de la campagne, Amsterdam 1766 and Honny soit qui mal y pense ou histoires de filles célebres du XVIIIe siècle, Londres 1766. This is the second of two editions of this work which appeared in the same year under the same imprint. MMF record a further three editions.

An important economic treatise on the causes of financial distress in France, with suggested political and economic solutions. Boullainvilliers’ frank exposé of the last years of Louis XIV’s reign was rather too much for the authorities, who had it condemned on publication. His political writings - ‘original to the point of eccentricity’, says Christopher Betts in the New Oxford Companion to Literature in French - were hostile to royal policy and express an extreme version of feudalism, ‘le chef d’œuvre de l’esprit humain’, in which power is returned from the king to the nobles. An expansion of the economic sections of his more famous État de la France, the present work is dedicated to the duc d’Orléans. In common with all Boulainvilliers’ works, the present memoir was published posthumously and outside France.
Boulainvilliers presents his argument in six parts or memoirs, the most striking of which is the second, that comes down heavily against the financiers and proposes a separate office for the state treasure, the third memoir, which attacks arbitrary taxation and the sixth, particularly resonant, which attacks poor financial administration. Boulainvilliers may have been an eccentric, but many of his economic theories were well ahead of his time and anticipated the ideas of the physiocrats, by whom he was much admired.
‘Some scholars happily ascribe all six memoranda under consideration to Boulainvilliers in order (it appears) to enhance his reputation - for once an attractive reputation - as an aristocratic liberal or progressive reformer of the 18th century. In fact, one may exclude from the Boulainvilliers corpus two or even three of the six memoranda under consideration. In keeping with Boulainvilliers' character, the author of memorandum 1 claims no expertise in fiscal matters, recommends instead that some faithful, enlightened, and wise persons screen any financial advice or projects submitted to the regent, and urges him above all to assemble the Estates. Equally consonant with Boullainvilliers' character is memorandum 4’ (H. A. Ellis, S. 244f).

Second edition of Dieudonné Thiebault’s detailed memoirs of the court of Frederick II covering Frederick himself, his family, the court, the Academy, schools, philosophers and intellectuals, and the military and civil government of Prussia. Thiebault had first gone to Berlin in 1765 to take up a post as Professor of Literature at the Academy on the recommendation of d’Alembert. He subsequently became an advisor to the king, helping him with his addresses to the Académie des sciences de Berlin and editing many of his works prior to publication. Thiebault remained in Berlin for twenty years, where he was given a place in the Academy and was granted a pension by Frederick.

Provenance: Michel-Frédéric Pillet-Will (1781-1860), with black labels lettered ‘Pillet-Will’ in gilt at the foot of the spines.

An attractive copy of one of Mercier's most important works, a collection of short essays, some written in the form of dream sequences, and one or two 'contes'. Some parts had previously been published in Mercier's Songes philosophiques, 1768, but this was very much part of Mecier's distinctive style. 'He published prodigiously by recycling passages from one book to another and stretching essays into multi-volume tracts. His major works - L'An 2440, Tableau de Paris, and Mon Bonnet de Nuit - therefore have a formless character. They are composed of short chapters on a wide variety of subjects, which Mercier cobbled together without worrying about narrative coherence. When a book caught on, he expanded it, cutting and pasting and fighting off pirates as he advanced from one edition to the next. The result was never elegant, but it often had a gripping quality, because Mercier knew how to observe the world around him and to make it come alive in anecdotes and essays. There is no better writer to consult if one wants to get some idea of how Paris looked, sounded, smelled, and felt on the eve of the Revolution' (Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers, 1996, p. 118).
The work is made up of two distinct parts. In the first edition, volumes III and IV bear exactly the same imprint as the present edition but have a different pagination, viz. pp. [iv], 390; [iv], 382. It was inordinately popular and many editions followed, both in two and in four volumes. MMF lists a total of twenty-six editions. The final two volumes were also published under the title, Mon Bonnet du Matin.

A curious Ossian style production, with a Norwegian saga written in Italian terza rima and printed alongside the supposedly English prose original, ‘Almurka and Snivenus’. Set in early medieval Norway where the enlightened monarchs Alminda (the name has been changed to be more resonant with the Italian language) and Sniveno reign over a peaceful nation, though under the rule of Britain. One sorrowful day the King of Britain summons Sniveno, ‘come to the English court; an high reason of state requires it’ and despite the anguished entreaties of his wife, fearful of the raging seas, he submits to the order and embarks for Britain. A few days later, the vessel ‘was assailed in a dark night by a terrible storm. The ship was flinged up and down by the waves and beated at once by winds, hail, and rain. The thunder bursted in the darkness. The Master of the ship was appaled for the danger; the thunderbolt rending the clouds sended on the surge a flash of livid light. The sailors had lost their art and spirit. The vessel was plunged down almost topsyturvy and cryes and groans were heard. The whirlwind broke masts and sails; the surpassing and raged waves fluttered around the bodys of agonizing and dead men, and some of them not yet entirely drowned uttered in their throat with a dying groan the name of their fathers, children and wives’. The spirit of Snivenus assumes the form of the drowned king and returns in a dream to Almurka, who goes to the shore where she finds her husband’s corpse and promptly dies of grief. The Italian poem is clearly the original, but the florid English translation, so clearly non-native, is charming.
Alminda e Sniveno first appeared in Milan in 1818 and this second edition was first published in 1821. OCLC lists only the 1821 edition of Novella Romantica, at Bodleian and the BN. The Bodleian copy is catalogued as pp. [24], which brings the volume to the conclusion of ‘Alminda e Sniveno’, with a final Italian poem printed on the verso. In the present volume, the dates on the imprint have been altered to 1823 and a further eight pages have been added, comprising Italian poems on mainly historical themes. The second work in the volume, Pascoli’s Improvvisi, contains a selection of verse on various subjects; it was first published in 1812 (actually 1821) with slightly differing contents. The divisional title, ‘Rime Faceto-Morali’ has been stamped ‘Estemporanee’. The final work in the volume is a New Year’s poem for 1823. Although not recorded as by Pascoli, its inclusion in this volume and the similarity with his other publications, would suggest his authorship.

A scarce edition, in three parts, of five major works by the Italian physician, historian and biographer Paolo Giovio, including his account of Muscovy and his history of Britain.
The first part features the ‘Elogia doctorum virorum’ of 1546 - an encyclopaedia of early humanism celebrating with short biographies important scholars of the time including Trapetiuntius, Regiomontanus, Thomas Linacre, Copernicus, Machiavelli and Zwingli. The second includes his ‘Descriptiones Britanniae, Scotiae, Hyberniae & Orchadum’ of 1548, devoted to the history and ethnography of the British Isles, followed by ‘elogia’ of important British figures including Thomas More, chronological annals of the kingdom and a genealogical diagram of the kings of England. The third part begins with his influential account of Muscovy first published in 1525: a fundamental source for the knowledge of Russia in 16th-century Europe, with sections on its history, customs, religion and language. His first and less famous ‘De Romanis Piscibus libellus’ of 1524 is also included, an account of all the kinds of fish which could be caught in the River Tiber, as well as ‘Descriptio Larii Lacus’, a topographical account of Lake Como, near which Giovio lived.
In a fine contemporary binding, probably from southern Germany: the blind stamps of the Crucifixion, with the snake wrapped around the Cross and St Peter is typical of sixteenth century bindings from Bavaria and Saxony.

A scarce novel first published earlier the same year under a false ‘Philadelphie’ imprint. Set in Paris and provincial France, the novel is concerned with the travels, misfortunes, entanglements and romantic adventures of the hero, Paulin, ‘un coquin charmant’ and the Comte de Walter. Full of incident, the novel includes an ambush, kidnappings, a hermit, mistaken identities, touching heroics and faithful lovers, who are happily reunited in the closing chapter.
The author, Charles François Grandville, was a prominent actor who had a successful career at the Comédie-Française throughout the 1820s. This is his only published work, written as a young man who describes himself as a ’Comédien du Boulevard’. The work is prefaced by a ‘Conversation sur l’Auteur et son Roman’, in which two young girls, Claire and Rose, discuss the novel. Rose has been reading the book and is half in love with its hero, Paulin. She eventually persuades Claire, who dislikes reading, to go to the bookseller and buy a copy before it sells out and she is forced to wait for a second edition.

An early edition - for many years thought to be the first - of Diderot’s first original work, bound in nineteenth century morocco. An immediate furore followed its initial publication and it was condemned to be burnt by the Paris Parlement for its dangerous and anti-religious content: ‘the venom of the most criminal opinions that the depravity of human reason is capable of’. Diderot’s original manuscript had been purchased by the bookseller Durand and the first editions were printed in Paris at the clandestine press of l’Epine. It was to become one of Diderot’s most popular and controversial works, running to at least eighteen editions in the eighteenth century and prompting numerous refutations.
At this stage in his life, the young Diderot was a Deist and in the Pensées he sets out to demonstrate the existence of God through evidence of the material world. He attacks atheism in this work, but also criticises revealed religion and religious asceticism and challenges the existence of miracles. He writes eloquently of human passions and argues for the reconciliation of feeling with reason. The work is presented in the form of sixty-two short chapters, some of which are little more than maxims, brief and quotable in the manner of La Rochefoucauld, such as: ’A thing is not proved just because no one has ever questioned it’; ‘One may demand of me that I should seek truth but not that I should find it’ and ‘Skepticism is the first step towards truth’. The work concludes with a final detailed index.
This is one of four editions that appeared in 1746, all with the imprint ‘A la Haye, aux dépens de la compagnie’. The present printing was long thought to be the first edition, partly on account of its errors in pagination, but Adams demonstrates that it is third in priority. Furthermore he concludes that the present edition was entirely reset, rather than as previously thought a few corrections being made to a number of pages. The printer’s ornament is the same as both previous editions, but the double rule in the imprint of this copy measures 50mm, rather than the 45mm as called for by Adams.
With an attractive engraved frontispiece in the manner of Eisen, in which the voluptuous figure of Truth standing on the right removes the mask from the foul looking figure of Superstition, who is lounging on the floor with a broken sceptre. In our copy the plate measures 98 x 57 mm.

A scarce book of considerable significance, this was the first work to introduce the ideas of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) to the French-speaking world. In the long preface, Villers discusses the impact of Kant’s works and their principal opposition, comparing him in importance with Descartes and Copernicus. ‘C’est en 1781 que parut le livre à jamais mémorable, Critique de la Raison Pur... une doctrine nouvelle [qui] ruinait toutes les métaphysiques qui l’avaient précédé... Ce livre renfermait la plus désolante et la plus irréfragable définition du mot savoir, chose que tant de savans ignorent’ (pp. xix-xx). Villers highlights Kant as one of two game-changing thinkers of the age, the other being Lavoisier: ‘La nouvelle chimie, la nouvelle philosophie, sont les deux tendances majeures de notre âge, les deux degrés scientifiques les plus remarquables qu’a monté notre génération’ (p. x).
Villers expresses his surprise that such a key thinker has remained unknown in France: ‘Depuis près de vingt ans, une nouvelle philosophie qui intéresse tout le savoir humaine... est encore inconnue aux Français, et il ne s’en est pas encore trouvé un seul qui ait entrepris de l’étudier et de la faire connaître à sa patrie... Mais il semble qu’il y ait une distance infranchissable de l’esprit français à l’esprit allemand; ils sont placés sur deux sommets entre lesquels il y a un abîme. C’est sur cet abîme que j’ai entrepris de jeter un pont’ (pp. lx-lxiv).
Villers studied at the Benedictine College in Metz and then went on to the School of Applied Artillery in the same town, where he developed an interest in animal magnetism. After the French revolution, he moved to Göttingen where he had an affair with the German intellectual Dorothea von Schlözer, subsequently moving in with her and her husband, Mattheus Rodde, where the three lived openly as a menage à trois. It was Villers’ French nationality that protected the household during the French occupation in 1806, a narrative that is described in his a letter written to Fanny de Beauharnais and published as Lettre contenant un récit des événements qui se sont passés à Lübeck le 6 novembre 1806, [sans lieu] 1807, a popular work which in later editions carried Fanny de Beauharnais’ name on the title-page.

An attracitve Cambridge printed anthology based on an edition originally prepared by Henri Estienne, in a distinctive, probably continental, contemporary heraldic vellum binding. This collection of Greek poetry, printed in parallel text with the Latin throughout, contains the Cambridge physician Ralph Winterton’s commentary on Hesiod.