Old Book Hunter #1

Laborde travelled to Petra in 1828 with the engineer Linant de Bellefonds, and the resulting Paris folio of 1830 was the work that gave Europe its first substantial visual record of the site; Murray's 1836 octavo is the first English translation of that narrative. Its plates and folding map put Petra, Sinai and the Edom of the prophecies in front of an English readership at the height of Victorian interest in biblical geography.

Eighteenth-century Lisbon histories of the Portuguese campaigns against the Moors of North Africa and of the Estado da Índia are primary vehicles through which Portugal narrated its own imperial and crusading past, and they remain source material for historians of Christian–Muslim conflict and early European expansion. Surviving Portuguese imprints of this period are comparatively thin on the ground outside Iberia, since much of Lisbon's book stock and printing infrastructure was disrupted by the 1755 earthquake only three years after this date.

Halfpenny's Chinese-taste pattern books were among the cheap, practical manuals that carried chinoiserie out of aristocratic commissions and into English gardens, bridges, temples and interiors in the 1750s, feeding the vogue that Chambers and the Kew pagoda later monumentalized. As working builders' handbooks their plates were used, cut up and discarded, so complete four-part copies with the full plate sequence in a period binding are the exception rather than the rule.

Daniel Johnson was a surgeon in the Bengal medical service (assistant surgeon 1789, surgeon 1805, retired 1809) who wrote up decades of upcountry experience as one of the earlier first-hand English accounts of Indian hunting, chiefly tiger and leopard in the Ramghur districts. Beyond sport it is an observational source on local practice — snake-catching by the people the book calls 'Cunjoors,' and remarks on hydrophobia and rabid animals — which is why it turns up in Indian travel and natural-history collections as much as sporting ones.

Live auction

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Why it matters

Bayle's Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, launched at Amsterdam in March 1684, was the founding organ of learned review journalism and shaped the international "Republic of Letters" for a generation. The presence of the short-lived Mercure sçavant — of which, as the seller notes, only the January and February 1684 issues appeared — makes this a documentary pairing of Bayle's journal with the ephemeral periodical that immediately preceded and reportedly helped prompt it.

Why we're looking

A detailed, collated description of what appears to be the 1684 issue rather than the more commonly encountered 1686 re-edition, bound together with the two only issues of the Mercure sçavant and retaining music and scientific plates in early mottled calf.

Watch out for

This is a live auction and any current bid is not evidence of a bargain. Verify the 1684 versus 1686 setting against a reliable collation (the seller notes the month-division differs from the publisher's suggested arrangement), confirm the loss of text at p. 531 is acceptable, and check plate count and the torn plate in person or via additional images before bidding.