Old Book Hunter #8

Hervieux de Chanteloup's Nouveau traité des serins de Canarie, first published in Paris in 1709 and dedicated to Anne of Bavaria, Princesse de Condé, is generally described as the first monograph devoted to the canary, covering origins, breeding, cages, feeding, illnesses and cures. It is also an early example of a bird book printed with engraved music — tunes on the flageolet to be taught to the birds — and it was reprinted repeatedly through the eighteenth century, this 1745 Saugrain printing being one of those later editions. It’s essentially a handbook on breeding and keeping canaries, and it includes printed tunes for teaching the birds to sing. Owners played these melodies over and over on a serinette, a small hand-cranked bird organ, until the canary learned to sing them back.

Barrington's Miscellanies gathers his Royal Society papers, including the celebrated eyewitness account of the eight-year-old Mozart examined in London, his tracts arguing the North Pole could be reached by sea, and his English translation of the Maurelle journal of the 1775 Spanish voyage up the Northwest Coast. Barrington was also Gilbert White's principal correspondent, and White's letters to him make up a large part of The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789).

Clio and Euterpe was Henry Roberts's engraved anthology of English song, issued in London across roughly 1758–1762 in three volumes with a later supplementary volume published by John Welcker; institutional copies, such as the MFA's, record a three-volume octavo set of this period entirely engraved. Roberts had already made his name with the engraved songbook Calliope, or English Harmony (1739), and these collections are valued as much for their pictorial engraved headpieces as for the music, which preserves a broad cross-section of mid-Georgian theatre, pleasure-garden and domestic song. Each song is engraved with its own pictorial headpiece (“designs adapted to each song”), which makes this one of the prettiest English songbooks of the century. The listing has gilt edges on all sides, an engraved title page with a figure of Euterpe, and what looks like an armorial bookplate. Full three-volume sets don’t turn up often.

Ancillon's anonymous 1707 treatise is the fullest early-modern legal and social argument over whether eunuchs and castrati could lawfully marry, weighing civil against canon law and padding the case with historical and anecdotal material; the dedication is signed with the anagram "C. d'Ollincan." Its reach extended into English through Robert Samber's translation, issued by Edmund Curll as Eunuchism Display'd in 1718, which is how the text entered the anglophone literature on castrati. It’s half treatise on castration and half gossip about opera stars.

Burney's account of his 1770 continental journey, first published in 1771, was the research travelogue behind his later General History of Music, and it remains a primary first-hand record of European musical life — opera houses, conservatories, performers — as an informed English listener found them. It is also read as an 18th-century travel narrative in its own right, and the Italian and French tours together shaped how later generations understood the period's musical culture. The photos suggest a link to H. L. Mencken: one image’s caption mentions a handwritten “To H.L. Mencken” dated March 19, 1930. Mencken was a serious amateur musician, so that would be a lovely provenance. But the seller doesn’t describe or document it, so treat it as unverified. The first edition at this price is good value even without it.