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[20 pp.], 23 x 19 cm (9 x 7.5 inches), manuscript in Italian, in dark brown ink on 10 sheets of laid paper with a post horn watermark and name of Van der Ley paper makers, and watermarks with initials GR and a crown (minor age-toning, tiny holes from binding on the spine, unbound and inserted in a later marbled…

Very Rare – the first edition of ‘Monzongo’, “the most popular anti-slavery production staged across the Netherlands until well into the nineteenth century”, authored by Nicolaas Simon van Winter, the eminent merchant, poet and dramatist who became an ardent Abolitionist upon witnessing the brutal Dutch crackdown which ended the Berbice Slave Rebellion (1763-4), in modern-day Guyana; the play concerns an…

The original proposal for the grand Modernist masterplan to redevelop Caracas, conceived at the hight of the Venezuelan Oil Boom, when the city was one of the fastest growing and most economically vibrant urban areas on earth; illustrated by over a dozen sophisticated thematic maps, this preliminary study of the ‘Plano Regulador’, developed by an all-star international team of urban…

An exceedingly rare depiction of a Prague folk festival for the Coronation of Emperor Ferdinand I and Maria Anna of Savoy, lithographed in Litoměřice, showcases unique ethnographic and documentary details from this historic event as well as the diversity of Bohemian culture and social life of the early 19th century in Prague.   Lithograph, 55 x 69 cm (21.6 x…

A rare map of the Bosporus commissioned by Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II and created by Prussian military surveyor Helmuth von Moltke.   Lithography with original colour in outline, 73,5 x 68 cm (29 x 26,77 inches), dissected in 20 segments and mounted on linen. An advertisement of Artaria, Vienna, on green paper mounted on one of the segments verso. Housed…

An ephemeral broadside, printed in Damascus in Arabic and Ottoman languages, marks the stations along the Hejaz Railway between Damascus and Medina, as well as the availability of water for washing and drinking.   Broadside: 37 x 23,5 cm (14.5 x 9.28 inches), original blind stamp (little age-toned, light staining and tiny tears, but overall good).

After World War I and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, diplomat Fahreddin Reşad Bey (also known as Rumbeyoğlu Fahreddin Bey or Rumbeyoglu Fahr al-Din Bey, 1867–1943) and Mehmed Nâbi Bey (1868–1924), who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs beginning in October 1918, released several government publications about foreign affairs administration in former Ottoman territories and border regions at the…

A trio of very large format diagrams (2 blueprint maps, 1 line chart) made for the Companhia de Petróleo de Angola in the 1920s, when it was prospecting the Cuanza (Kwanza) Basin, one of Africa’s great petroleum deposits; the works were drafted by James J. McGowan, a larger-than-life Irish-American engineer who later became a pillar of Luanda’s business community; the…

Exceedingly rare - 1 of only 3 known examples - the first ultra-detailed printed city plan of Paramaribo, the capital of Surinam, issued only 12 years after the abolition of slavery, when the city’s was experiencing dramatic physical and population growth due the influx of emancipated slaves migrating from rural plantations; made by Albertus Jacobus Meijer, a tax collector, who…

An exceedingly rare survivor - 1 of only 2 known examples - an official, authoritative account of the efforts of the crusading physician Henry Nicholls to combat the scourge of Yaws, a highly infectious disease that was then ravaging the working population of the Caribbean island of Dominica; here Nicholls details the disease’s origins, symptoms, pathology, diagnoses, and treatments, and…

A documentary report on Haiti by former President François Denys Légitime   Large 8º, [8 pp.], full page portrait on thicker paper, full page view of Port au Prince on thicker paper, XLVI, 422 pp., [4 pp.], double-page colour lithographed map, later binding with red marbled paper boards and cloth spine with lettering, speckled edges (binding slightly rubbed on the…

8° (22 x 14.5 cm): [2], 82 pp., bound in modern marbled paper wrappers (Very Good, uncut, overall clean, just the odd light spot, some light toning to last leaf).