Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent.. London: Printed by Tho. Cotes, and are to be sold by Iohn Benson, 1640

First collected edition of Shakespeare’s poems and the earliest obtainable edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Please inquire

De Architectura. Venice: Giovanni Tacuino, 22 May 1511

First illustrated edition of Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture, a landmark in the history of architecture. This is the only work on architecture to survive from antiquity. It was Vitruvius (ca. 90-20 BC) who famously declared that a structure must be durable, useful, and beautiful. His terms for order, arrangement, proportion, and fitness for purpose have guided architects for centuries. Vitruvius served in the campaigns of Julius Caesar, and he was involved in the restoration of Roman aqueducts. In ancient Rome, architecture encompassed not just the design of buildings but also civil and mechanical engineering, construction, military engineering, and urban planning.

$95,000

Aristoteles Master-piece, or, The Secrets of Generation displayed in all the parts thereof.. London: J. How, 1684

First edition of Aristotle’s Masterpiece, “the most popular book about women’s bodies, sex, pregnancy, and childbirth in Britain and America from its first appearance in 1684 up to at least the 1870s” (Treasures, Library Company of Philadelphia).

$60,000

The World as I See It. New York: Philosophical Library, (c.1949)

Signed and dated 1950 by Albert Einstein on the front free endpaper.

$13,500

The Second World War. London: Cassell, 1948-1954

FIRST ENGLISH EDITIONS. Signed and dated by Churchill in the first volume.

$18,500

The Indo-Iranian borderlands: their prehistory in the light of geography and of recent explorations. The Huxley Memorial Lecture for 1934. London: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 1934

First separate edition. This is Stein’s lecture delivered on the occasion of being awarded the Society’s Huxley Medal.

$1,500

Specimen Days & Collect. Philadelphia: David McKay, 1882-'83

FIRST EDITION, second printing, first issue. Thomas Harned’s copy, with his bookplate. Whitman’s friend Harned was one of the poet’s literary executors, alog with Horace Traubel and Richard B. Bucke.

$800

Original drawing of Walt Whitman. no date, no place, 19th century

This original pen and ink drawing of Walt Whitman is mounted at the front of an 1888 edition of Leaves of Grass. The likeness of a jaunty, casual, Whitman wearing his trademark slouch hat takes its cue from the famous 1855 Hollyer engraving, but here we see an older Whitman with a full beard.

$4,800

Leaves of Grass. Boston: Osgood, 1881-82

First printing of the 7th edition of Leaves of Grass

$1,500

Poems … selected and edited by William Michael Rossetti. London: John Camden Hotten, 1868

FIRST ENGLISH EDITION of Whitman’s poems.

$850