Why it matters

This is the first English-language edition of the first volume of 'Le antichità di Ercolano esposte', the official Neapolitan folio record of the Herculaneum excavations issued for the Reale Accademia Ercolanese di Archeologia; the part translated here is the volume of wall paintings, and no further parts of the English version were published. It put the buried city's painted interiors in front of a British audience at the moment when Herculaneum and Pompeii were reshaping European taste in decoration and design.

Why we're looking

At 675 USD this sits well under the complete copies we found — roughly $870 below the Louis88Books copy at US$1,546.25 and far below Jeremy Norman's US$3,750 copy, with an eBay copy (complete but poorly bound) at £790 in between — and unlike those it is still in its original diced calf rather than rebacked. The gap is at least partly explained by the missing map frontispiece and cracked hinge, so the question for the curator is whether an untouched original binding with 50 plates is worth the defect at this level.

Watch out for

The seller is upfront that the front hinge is cracked and that the map frontispiece is absent, and institutional cataloguing of this edition does record a map alongside the 50 leaves of plates, two of them folded — so the copy is short of the standard makeup, and it is worth asking whether both folding plates are present and clean. The Cochin and Bellicard material in this description (the c. 1750 visit, the theatre and Basilica plans) belongs to their separate 'Observations upon the Antiquities of the Town of Herculaneum' of 1753, a different book with 42 plates, and should not be taken as describing plates in this volume. Condition of the individual plates and the completeness of the subscriber list are not detailed — both are reasonable direct questions for the seller.