Rare books from Bernard Quaritch Ltd

4to maquette, comprising a printed general title-page and dedication (to the author's father and Jean-Henry Lévesque), and 7 autograph manuscript essays, written on loose sheets on rectos only in blue pen, and heavily corrected in pen and pencil throughout; each part preserved in a hand-decorated chemise; the whole group in a folding painted chemise with the general title-page, and in a black card box, decorated in scraffito on the front with an image of Brahma, and with a chess-board in perspective on the rear (edges worn), the interior faces with a black and white typographic design.
An extraordinary, unique production, with seven long, unpublished observational essays by Fricker on the post-war Parisian art world, including long discussions of the work of Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, and Blaise Cendrars; assembled in hand-decorated chemises and a folding box designed by his sister Jeanine Fricker, one of the leading lights of modern French… Read More

8vo (255 x 158mm), 23 volumes and etched steel plate in box; uncut, volumes and box bound in original coloured full buckram by the Leighton-Straker Bookbinding Co., Ltd., gilt morocco lettering-pieces on spines, top edges gilt; a little light wear and occasional soiling, spines of a few volumes lightly sunned; a very good set.
Limited edition of 877, of which 66 sets were destroyed when a bomb hit the bindery in September 1940, so at most 811 complete sets survive (Dreyfus, Nonesuch Press, 108). The steel plate included with this set is number 605, "Solemn reference is made to Mr. Bunsby" from Dombey and Son
(Chapter 23, facing p.458), engraved by H. K. Browne ('Phiz'), with the typed letter of authenticity on Chapman & Hall headed paper, signed by Arthur Waugh.
Intended as a definitive edition of Dickens' works the Nonesuch Press edition was printed using the original steel… Read More

First edition in Russian of To have and have not (1937), with an introduction by the Soviet critic Ivan Anisimov. Hemingway's first appearance in Russian was Death in the Afternoon in 1934, when he was praised in the Soviet Union as an active anti-Fascist, and he soon became a favourite foreign author of both the intellectuals and the masses.
The translator Evgenia Kalashnikova had translated Hemingway's Farewell to Arms in 1936. She went on to translate Thackeray, Bernard Shaw, Dickens, Scott Fitzgerald, C. S. Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, John Steinbeck and many others into Russian.
OCLC records copies at Princeton, South Carolina, and Virginia.
12mo, pp. 237, [3]; light browning, creases to a few pages, but generally a very good copy in the publisher's binding of half cloth, printed paper label to front cover, illustrated endleaves.

First edition of this collection of chronicles, covering sixteen hundred years of world history from the birth of Christ to its publication, composed by the ecclesiastical historian Aubert le Mire of Brussels, this copy from the library of Jacques Auguste de Thou.
The volume opens with Eusebius of Caesarea's chronicle to the year 329 AD, with St Jerome's supplement to 381. This is followed by Sigebert of Gembloux's medieval Chronicon covering the period between 381 and 1112, with additions up to the year 1225 by Anselm of Gembloux and others. The final part comprises Le Mire's own chronicle ('ex vetustis scriptoribus') from 1200 to 1608, ending with an index directing the reader to passages relating to, for example, Jerusalem and Rhodes, numerous emperors, kings and popes, religious and military orders, plagues and earthquakes, and the invention of printing, which is discussed at length under the year 1440. A pupil of Justus Lipsius, Le Mire (1573–1640) enjoyed a successful ecclesiastical and… Read More

First edition of Newton's collected works, edited and introduced by the Pisa alumnus Giovanni Salvemini da Castiglione. The edition contained twenty-six works which, while having appeared previously, were not easily accessible, from Newton's mathematical works and optical lectures, which were greatly influential and laid the foundations of modern science, to his philological essays on history and theology. It thus became a major tool in the dissemination of Newton's science and a major publication in the history of science.
The first volume, mathematical papers, contains De analysi (1711), Methodis fluxionum (1736), De quadratura (1704), Enumeratio curvarum (1704), Methodus differentialis (1711), and excerpts from Newton's correspondence with John Collins, John Wallis, Henry Oldenburg, and Abbe Conti. The second volume, philosophical papers, includes De mundi systemate (1731), Lectiones opticae (1729), De natura acidorum (1736), Scala graduum caloris (1701), and his papers from the Philosophical… Read More

First edition, very scarce in commerce, of an exhilaratingly spiteful attack on Pope in the wake of the publication of the Dunciad variorum, comprising seven different satirical texts, three in verse, issued in quarto to match 'the least pompous Edition of the Dunciad'.
Its authorship remains uncertain. Pope wrote to Lord Oxford on 16 May 1726: 'I see a Book with a Curious Cutt calld Pope Alexrs Supremacy &c. 4o. In it are 3 or 4 things so false & scandalous that I think I know the Authors, and they are of a Rank to merit Detection … The book is writ by Burnet, & a Person who has great obligations to me, & the Cut is done by Ducket'. He later ascribed it to Duckett and John Dennis.
Among the various charges laid at Pope's feet are his deformity ('Be his Crown Picked, to One Side reclin'd / Be to his Neck his Buttocks closely join'd')' his ingratitude to Wycherley; that he is a spy for the Tories ('he listed openly in the Tory Service'); and that he avoided facing his critics after the… Read More

An attractive illustrated edition of twenty-seven of Plutarch's lives, extensively annotated by a Papal tax-collector, in a striking contemporary binding.
The contemporary binding, titled in gilt on the upper board and decorated both in blind and gilt, employs a striking central tool of a vase of flames. Hobson identifies this emblem in renaissance tooling as a symbol of love, whether carnal or spiritual, or of devotion to a patron. Though a frequently used motif, we have not been able to locate any other use of the same tool, other instances showing small handles on the 'hips' of the vase rather than the more elaborate handles found here. The floral roll and the unusual repeated strapwork tool used for the borders are likewise unidentified. For two uses of the same (or very similar) fleur-de-lys and ray, however, see De Marinis 470 and 1207 ter.
Zoppino's Seconda et ultima parte completes for the first time Giorgio Rusconi's Prima parte of 1518; copies are also sometimes found with the later… Read More

First edition of Dio's Roman History in any language, translated into Italian from the original Greek by Niccolò Leoniceno and preceding the Greek editio princeps, printed by Robert Estienne in 1548, by some fifteen years. Born and raised at Nicaea in Bithynia, Dio (c. 164–235) served as a senator and consul in Rome, composing his famous Roman History in eighty books over the course of two decades, beginning with the landing of Aeneas in Italy and ending with his own retirement in 229. About a third of the work has come down to us intact, with books 36-54, covering the years 69-10 BC, surviving complete. This Italian rendering of books 37 to 58 was undertaken by the eminent Italian physician and humanist Niccolò Leoniceno (1428–1524), being completed by 1488 but remaining unpublished until this Zoppino edition. The text, encompassing the lives and deeds of Julius Caesar, Pompey, Mark Antony, Cleopatra, Augustus, Tiberius, and Caligula, is handsomely illustrated with oblong woodcuts at the… Read More

First edition of this rare translation of the pseudo-Augustinian Meditationum Liber, an eleventh-century devotional text very popular in the Middle Ages.The translator, John Martin, was an Augustinian friar who became a fervent activist within the Society of United Irishmen. His political conversion (and this book) coincided with the outbreak of the rebellion of 1798, in which he took a number of increasingly dangerous commissions from the Dublin United Irish Committee, but he has been largely neglected in the historiography of the rebellion; his stance suited neither loyalists nor rebel apologists, and he remains an enigmatic figure.Daire Keogh, '"The most dangerous villain in society"; Fr. John Martin's Mission to the United Irishmen of Wicklow in 1798', Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 7, (1992), pp. 115-135.ESTC records copies at the British Library, National Library of Ireland, and Illinois only.

Scarce first edition thus of this collection of letters by the Irish writer Hugh Boyd (1746-1794), compiled by Andrew Burchet Bone, and with a life of Boyd by Lawrence Dundas Campbell.Originally published in the Hircarrah in 1793 and 1794, the letters here discuss, inter alia, philosophy (especially Rousseau), the French, poetry and painting, conversation, dress, the theatre, ancient Greece and Rome, music, marriage, human nature, Sir William Jones, and, naturally enough, the British in India. Apologising for the delay in publication and typographical inaccuracies, the editor refers to 'the yet infant state of the press in India'. The list of subscribers includes the Madras Circulating Library.Boyd had a colourful career: a popular figure in London fashionable society, he numbered 'Edmund Burke, Catharine Macaulay, David Garrick, John Wilkes, and Joshua Reynolds among his wide circle of acquaintances' (ODNB). He married into money but having exhausted his wife's fortune was forced to join the East… Read More

First edition, no. 74 of 225 copies of the special edition, signed by Lewis, additionally inscribed, in c. 1951, 'To Geoffrey Bridson (through whom I am enabled to finish this book) – deepest thanks and friendliest greetings / Wyndham Lewis'.'In 1921 Lewis had embarked on another ambitious project, a Rabelaisian fictional anatomy of postwar Britain.' The first portion 'finally and circuitously achieved publication at the end of the decade: The Childermass (1928), a work of theological science fiction set in an encampment of the dead on the banks of the River Styx' (Trotter).When D. G. Bridson first read The Childermass in 1932, he had concluded that 'the setting of the drama is only to be seen convincingly in the imagination. It was that fact, when I reread The Childermass in 1950, that had assured me it would make magnificent radio'. The radio production of 1951 was the genesis of his friendship with Lewis, and their collaboration in turn enabled Lewis to finish the remaining two parts of what… Read More

First English edition, one of Lewis's scarcest works (only 549 copies avoided destruction). Doom of Youth began life as a series of seven articles on youth politics in Time and Tide in June–July 1931, rounded off with a pair by G.K. Chesterton; it was expanded and first published in book form in New York. Of the 1518 copies printed only 411 had sold by the time Chatto and Windus faced two separate suits for libel, from Godfrey Winn and Alec Waugh (author of The Loom of Youth; his brother Evelyn, also satirised, took his charges on the chin). Lewis's publishers were already annoyed with him for his failure to provide them with the sequels to The Childermass, and avoided legal proceedings by withdrawing the book, returning 138 copies to Lewis and pulping 968. It was the last book he published with Chatto. 1932 was to prove an annus horribilis for Lewis, this the first of three books to be withdrawn from the market. See Bridson, The Filibuster, 'Thou Hast Robbed Me of My Youth', pp. 120–139.… Read More

First edition, inscribed 'To Geoffrey / my best copy / Wyndham'. Lewis breaks here with abstraction in the arts, naming Michael Ayrton, Francis Bacon, Henry Moore, Ceri Richards and others as 'the finest group of painters and sculptors which England has ever known'. Ayrton collaborated on many illustrations and dust-jacket designs after Lewis lost his sight.Pound & Grover A39; Morrow & Lafourcade A39a.

First edition, inscribed 'To Geoffrey Bridson – you who did so much to make the completion of this book possible, and who was chiefly responsible for its translation into Radio drama – I salute you. / Wyndham Lewis'. After the broadcast of Bridson's production of The Childermass (1928) on 18 June 1951, the BBC commissioned Lewis to complete the trilogy 'on the condition that when they were finished similar broadcast dramatizations would precede book publication. As a result of this sponsorship – largely the work of B.B.C. producer D. G. Bridson – Lewis was able to write Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta' (Morrow & Lafourcade). When the two novels had been completed, 'a set of the galley proofs was then made over to me, and I sketched out what had to be done. Briefly, this was a matter of writing additional scenes which would be necessary to bridge the gaps left by cutting such a lengthy work. The extra scenes were written by me along the lines that I had indicated, and the whole was trimmed… Read More

A fine set of the bibliographically complicated small octavo Works, including the scarce supplementary Vol II. Part II. These sets were by no means cheap reprints of the folio and octavo formats, as Pope actually preferred the 'neat little octavos', for both aesthetic and financial reasons, and they went through four to six editions each. 'Pope used successive editions to make significant revisions in the accidentals as well as the substantives of his text; and we know that he read proof for the volumes published for Lintot as well as those of his own printer and publishers' (Foxon, Pope and the Early Eighteenth Century Book Trade). 'The publishers appear to have planned at first to make this small octavo edition of Pope's Works a four volume set. Gilliver set the form by printing his small octavo Works, II, and the Dunciad as two "pocket volumes." Then Lintot came into the undertaking, and re-printed what he had the copyright in – the Works [I] of 1717 – and some additional poems, as two more… Read More