•  Exposicion: Palau 54257. Política peculiar: this edition not in Palau. Contemporary acid-stained calf simply gilt with brown leather label on each spine; scattered wormholes and some loss of leather over corners and at base of spine. Endpapers stencilled red and green. Some interior worming, most noticeable in endpapers and first title-page, resulting in loss of parts of letters without loss of sense. Scattered light foxing and a few leaves shallowly dog-eared. Inked ownership inscription on title-pages. All edges speckled red.

The volume is illustrated with six copper-engraved plates (five of which are folding) as well as an additional engraved title-page, 13 full-page engravings, and two in-text images. There is an extensiveindex.

•  Bitting 89; Palau 66773; Vicaire 174.   Contemporary vellum, spine with inked title; vellum darkened, spine title faded, spine with lined-through call number. Front pastedown with old cataloguing and Canadian bookseller's label affixed; front free endpaper and back pastedown with institutional rubber-stamps and the former with a slip affixed noting acquisition detail. One leaf with outer margin chipped, not touching text; faint waterstaining in upper margins of a few leaves.  (23368)

Scarce: OCLC and NUC Pre-1956 find only one holding, in the U.S. (i.e., Louisville, KY).

•  Removed from a nonce volume, now in a Mylar folder. Title-page with small inked numerals; last leaf with upper outer corner torn away and reattached some time ago. Lacking pp. 27–36. Complete up to (but only partly including) the Extrait of the Contrat de Mariage between Louis XIV and “Marie Therese” of Spain.  (23745)

•  Briseño, I, 294. Not in Palau. Modern wrappers. Small brown stain on last few leaves. A very good copy.

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Rare in commerce: No copy has appeared at auction in more than fifty years. The fact that it was printed on the portable press of Bolívar’s Army of Liberation, and in the small town of Cúcuta on the border between Colombia and Venezuela, adds to its rarity.

•  Not in Palau. Late 19th- or early 20th-century cloth over paste boards; binding shows wear and some insect damage. Front free endpaper with institutional rubber stamp. Text with occasional light foxing. Withal, a very good copy of a book that is now nearly impossible to find in any condition.

Click the images for enlargements.

There were two editions of the constitution in 1843: This one, and another that extended to 27 pages.

•  Not in Palau.   Original printed wrappers, small strip excised from blank area at top of front wrapper. Few dust smudges on wrappers. Very good copy. (15169)

Click the images for enlargements.

There were two editions in 1853, the other being 24 pages in length.

•  Palau 59737. Original printed yellow wrappers, creased and a little dusty. Very good condition.

Not in OCLC.

•  Not in Palau. Original printed green wrappers. Waterstaining to inner area of wrappers, same faintly visible in one area of title-page.

Click the image for an enlargement.

This is the first printing of that new liberal constitution, from the small press in the out-of-the-way town of Rionegro. It is very rare: We trace no copies via OCLC, RLIN, or NUC. Further, searches of the OPACs of the National Library of Colombia and of the universities of Cali and the Andes failed to locate a copy.

First edition and scarce: No copy traced via OCLC, RLIN, or NUC. Searches of the Hand Press Book and the KVK database, and of the OPACs of the national libraries of Britain, France, and Spain, locate only the copy at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek and four(!) at the Biblioteca Nacional.

•  Palau 59952 (never having seen a copy). Contemporary limp vellum with button and loop ties. A gorgeous copy.

Now very scarce and sought after: We locateonly one copy in the U.S. (at Kansas). 

Provenance: Sunderland, Spencer family — with a large, early version of their impressive gilt supra-libros on each cover. Sunderland sale lot 8995. 

•  Palau 59386. Contemporary mottled calf, gilt spine extra, gilt flaking away. Supra-libros as above.  Blind pressure-stamp on title-page and in margins of three other pages.

•  Sabin 16964.   Publisher's quarter cloth over marbled paper boards, lightly abraded; light foxing to interior. Private bookplate. Good+ copy. (20502)

Click either image
for an enlargement.

Rare.  The only copy we located in Latin America via METABASE is in the Biblioteca Monseñor Sanabria Martínez (Biblioteca Asamblea Legislativa de la República de Costa Rica). In the U.S. we locate only the copies at Bancroft and Harvard Law libraries.

Wrapper title is “Decretos y constitución política de la República de Costa-Rica, emitida en 1871 y adoptada en 1882.”

•  Not in Palau.   Original printed wrappers, wrappers dusty and with old pencil writing. (21258)

In the year before her pen is silenced and less than three before she falls victim to the plague while caring for her sick Sisters, Sor Juana attests to a legal document concerning her convent’s economic investments. She was the nunnery’s contadora (bookkeeper). By way of horribly evocative contrast, opposite her signature on the facing page is that of Francisco Aguiar y Seijas, Archbishop of Mexico, the misogynist who caused her to give up her writing and quasi-secular ways.

Able to bully the most gifted member of his religious community only following the return to Spain of her last viceregal patron and protector, the Marquis de la Laguna, Aguiar y Seijas applied increasing pressure to Sor Juana and the prioress of her Hieronymite convent. It took him from 1688 until 1693 to put “la decima Musa” “in her place.”

Documents signed by the polymath Sor Juana are very rare and highly sought after; this one desirably shows the trust her Sisters placed in her. The pairing of her signature with her arch enemy's is chilling and visually impactful.

•  In very good condition.

Click the images for enlargements.

•  Posada, Bibliografia bogotana, 231; Palau 59632. Sewn as issued, without the wrappers. Minor soiling to title-page and last (blank) page. Old inked numbers at top of title-page. A very good copy.