OLD BOOK HUNTER

Jean Prestet moved in Nicolas Malebranche's philosophical circle and was among the first to write mathematics in French rather than Latin, helping bring algebra to a wider audience — Abraham de Moivre reportedly taught himself the subject from an earlier edition of this same work. But this particular edition carries a more specific, citable distinction: scholars writing in the peer-reviewed journal Historia Mathematica have identified pages 140–150 of Volume I as containing Prestet's early precursor work toward the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic — the principle that every integer has a unique prime factorization, not rigorously proven until Gauss in 1801. The scholarship is careful here: Prestet never states the theorem outright, and it's genuinely debated whether he grasped its full implications. But the fact that mathematicians are still parsing his 336-year-old corollaries to answer that question is itself a real mark of the book's significance.

An entire 18th-century treatise on chimneys and smoke control, published at Dijon by F. Desventes in 1756 and attributed in library catalogues to Pierre Hébrard — a genuinely odd corner of the technical literature that sits at the junction of architecture, domestic comfort, and early applied physics of draught and combustion. Institutional interest is real rather than notional: the Metropolitan Museum holds a copy in its Drawings and Prints department (Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1937), and the ETH-Bibliothek copy has been digitised in e-rara.

Bewick's first major book put his wood engraving in front of a wide audience and made the medium a serious vehicle for natural history illustration, with the animal figures cut by Bewick and the descriptive text drafted by his partner Ralph Beilby and revised by Bewick. It was commercially successful on a scale unusual for a provincial Newcastle imprint, running to seven editions and some 14,000 copies, which is why the 1790 first is the edition collectors chase.

Waterton's Wanderings is one of the best-known first-hand British accounts of the Guiana interior and the Antilles, mixing field observation of tropical birds and animals with the notorious set-pieces (the ride on the cayman, the search for curare) that made it a durable classic of travel writing. The 1825 quarto is also the first appearance of his "Nondescript" frontispiece, the taxidermied composite creature that fed his reputation as a naturalist-eccentric. Waterton rode on the backs of caimans to study them up close, reportedly kept preserved human remains in his home, and the book's "Nondescript Man" is a bizarre composite creature he fabricated from animal parts that nearly caused a public uproar when unveiled.

The Nouveaux Mélanges are the vehicle Gabriel Cramer built in Geneva from 1765 onward to carry Voltaire's short pieces on religion, politics, history and literature, and several of those texts appear here in their first printing. The series grew well past its originally planned three volumes into a long collection that Bengesco treats as running to nineteen volumes — making a complete run a substantial slice of late-Voltaire publishing in one place.