•  Publisher's light boards with printed dust wrapper, in Mylar protective jacket. Nearly new.  (23241)

•  Publisher's blue cloth, d/j with several short tears, owner's stamp on top edge of closed book and signature on the front free endpaper.  (22702)

Languages charted in these tables include “Tartares Mouantcheoux,” Tamoul, Telongou, Persian (ancient and modern), Armenian, Russian (ancient and modern), Coptic, Hebrew, etc., with the engraving done by master artisan Robert Bénard (fl. 1750–85).

•  Half green calf with green marbled paper–covered sides, spine with gilt-stamped title; slight wear to corners and spine extremities. Lacking one plate (#25).  (24823)

Rare.   The first edition is vanishingly scarce, and this second only slightly less so; searches of various institutional databases locate only one U.S. and two overseas holdings of the second edition.

•  Contemporary half morocco with paper-covered sides, spine with gilt-stamped title; leather lost from corners and head of spine, binding a bit rubbed and scuffed. Front pastedown with private collector’s bookplate; front pastedown and free endpaper institutionally rubber-stamped. Light to moderate foxing throughout; plates of demonstration lacking, philosophical text (still interesting) all/only present, along with the frontispiece portrait of a young and serious-looking Favarger.

Click either image for an enlargement.

Binding:  Bound in black niger goat with a tobacco-colored niger inlay on front cover of a blind-tooled reproduction of the drawing of Bede presenting his work to Bishop Acca that appears in item 11 of this catalogue. That inset is surrounded by a second one of red niger, serving as a frame.

•  Binding as above. Original wrappers bound in. A treasurable copy.  (22442)

•  Publisher's black cloth, with charcoal gray dust jacket. A very good copy.  (22235)

Full text examples include the Lord's Prayer, The Creed, and First, Second, Third, and 15th Psalms.

Lane argues for the “great Benefit that ye Knowledge of this Art might be to the Clergy & all others” on the basis of speed (“as much may be written in one hour as by the Common Long Hand in six or more”) and easy acquisition (“[the rules are] laid down in such a plain and easie manner that any Person may learn it without a Teacher”).

Scarce: A search of ESTC locates seven copies, of which only two are in U.S. libraries. Not traced via OCLC and NUC-1956.

A nice example of a book not printed from moveable type; entirely printed from engraved plates.

•  ESTC T82591.   Sewn in original marbled-paper wrappers. Paper of spine chipped away, taking some paper at inner edge; small chips and nicks at edges of wrappers. Small bite out of outer margin of final leaf of text and final blank leaf; shallow chipping at lower outer corners and bottom margin of one page. Faint waterstaining. A good copy of a fragile little production.  (23729)

•  Publisher's tan cloth and blue d/j printed in white and “gold” with illustration. Corners bumped.  (22344)

•  Publisher's red cloth with gilt decoration on front board and gilt-title on spine. Publisher's dust jacket, good with only minor rubbing. Excellent copy.  (23274)

•  Publisher's quarter cream paper and marbled paper–covered sides, spine with gilt-stamped title; without dust jacket, but clean and fresh.  (24663)

•  Publisher's printed paper wrappers, front wrapper with early inked inscription on the “Written by” line and likewise along the outer edge; wrappers detached, with light soiling around edges and a few edge nicks.  (22157)

•  Publisher's light boards with gray printed d/j.  (24175)

The manuscript is exquisitely calligraphedentirely on fine quality vellum in black ink with some words and phrases in red, gold, blue, and sometimes combinations of the same all in one word. Each page of text is indited within a red triple-ruled frame which is itself enclosed in another red triple-ruled frame; large, swirled blue corner devices “connect” the ruled elements. Elegantly ornamented and illuminated“subtitles,” all different, introduce sections of the argument, and there are14 large historiated and illuminated initials (1.5" x 1.5"), each offering as background a landscape–architectural image accomplished in brown, red, blue, green and cream colors.

There are additionally four other family coats of arms skillfully rendered in color and illuminated here, these being the coats of arms of ancestors whose purity of blood is used to prove Don Juan Antonio's. The manuscript ends with the granting of the arms and a full explanation of each of their elements and the significance of their colors.

Binding: Contemporary full crimson goat, round spine with “spine compartments” defined by triple gilt fillets; each compartment with the central device of an urn. Covers with a gilt double-fillet outer border and a gilt floral-roll border within; turn-ins with a gilt roll of a rope design. Each full-page illumination and all coats of arms with salmon-colored silk guards, beautifully intact. All edges gilt.

•  Excellent condition on all points. Interestingly, this Spanish document in a Spanish morocco binding, recording the social apotheosis of a Basque whose fortunes grew via Mexican connections, is housed in a somewhat tattered and slightly broken contemporary pull-off-the-topgilt calf slipcase of Mexican workmanship.  (24671)

Weston’s claim for his systems was that “By this new method any, who can but tolerably write their names in round-hand, may with ease (by this book alone without any teacher) take down from ye speaker’s mouth, any sermon, speech, trial, play, &c., word by word, though they know nothing of Latin, and may likewise read one another’s writing distinctly, be it ever so long after it is written; to perform these by any other short-hand method extant is utterly impossible, as is evident from ye books themselves.” He also addresses the question of speed, assuring the would-be stenographer that in his method “ . . . can be joined in every sentence, at least two, three, four, five, six, seven, or more words together in one without taking off ye pen, in ye twinkling of an eye, and that by the signs of the English moods, tenses, persons, particles, &c., never before invented . . . [,]” the whole of a conversation can be captured.

•  ESTC T202325. Recent marbled paper–covered boards, spine with gilt-stamped leather title-label. Title-page and several others rubber-stamped by a now-defunct institution — being a “mercantile” library, interesting provenance for a book of this sort. First and last few leaves showing faint waterstaining; pages and plates otherwise generally clean.

•  Publisher's red cloth; dust jacket. Top of dust-jacket is a little frayed with tiny tears with slight loss of paper; short tears to front crease of the dust jacket at base of spine. A very good copy.  (21998)