The Michaelmas Sale

128 leaves, complete, 168 × 120 mm, i–xvi⁸, 17 lines ruled in pale red, 21 initials in burnished gold, four full borders of acanthus and strawberry.

Written and illuminated in Bruges for export to England, where it plainly arrived: the calendar gives Thomas Becket at 29 December, his name struck through by a Tudor hand obeying the proclamation of 1538 — which dates the book’s crossing better than any invoice could.

Chancery folio (287 × 200 mm): a–h⁸ i⁶, 70 leaves (of 71, without the final blank). Rubricated throughout in a contemporary hand.

A chronicle of the world on a single unrolling timeline — early print’s bestselling attempt at an infographic, the line of years threading through woodcut popes, emperors and cities. The view of Cologne is still crisp; the future, as issued, is blank.

Folio (345 × 222 mm): ¶⁸ 2¶⁶ A–6S⁶, engraved title by John Payne, above 2,700 woodcuts in text.

The corrected Johnson edition — Gerard emaculatus, Gerard cleaned up — and the form in which the great herbal was actually used for two centuries. The potato appears at p. 927 as it did in 1597, still wearing its wrong name of Virginia.

Folio (298 × 190 mm): [A]⁴ a–g² B–Z⁴ Aa–Ii⁴, with 38 engraved plates, of which 20 folding.

The first great picture-book of the invisible: the flea in armour, the louse gripping a hair, the point of a needle failing inspection. Pepys sat up with it until two in the morning and called it “the most ingenious book that ever I read in my life.”

Folio (430 × 285 mm), engraved general title and 96 double-page engraved maps, all in contemporary hand-colour, the tables of hundreds intact.

The last and fullest edition of Speed’s atlas of Britain, each county map with a town plan in its corner — many of them the first plan ever made of that town. A century of England, coloured while the paint was still an opinion.

Folio (315 × 195 mm): pp. [4], 166, [10], the leaf of subscribers present. First edition, published anonymously.

The first edition of the century’s most pirated cookbook. “First catch your hare” appears nowhere in it — what she wrote was “take your hare when it is cas’d,” which is better advice and worse legend. Genuinely rare in the first: most copies were cooked from until they fell apart.

2 volumes, folio (410 × 250 mm), titles printed in red and black; complete with the Grammar and the History of the English Language.

The first edition: 42,773 entries, written by one man with six amanuenses in a garret off Fleet Street, in nine years, against the forty French academicians’ fifty-five. Under LEXICOGRAPHER he defined himself: “a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge.”

2 volumes, 4to (292 × 230 mm), with the large folding chart of the southern hemisphere and 63 engraved plates and maps, complete.

The official account of the second voyage: the Resolution crossing the Antarctic Circle three times, Hodges’ plates of ice islands and Otaheite, and the folding chart that proved, at enormous cost, exactly how much nothing lay where the great southern continent was supposed to be.

8vo (170 × 100 mm), red straight-grain morocco gilt, all edges gilt, the painting emerging only under fanning.

Shut, the book shows only gold. Fanned, the gilt edge dissolves into a watercolour of Eton College from the river, painted — invisibly, and decades after printing — in the manner of the Edwards of Halifax bindery. A devotional book improved by vanity, which is the usual direction.

3 volumes, 12mo (172 × 105 mm), the half-titles present in all three volumes, as they frequently are not.

The first edition: 2,000 copies, a quarter of them remaindered in 1821 — her contemporaries were not sure. The dedication to the Prince Regent was commanded, not offered, and Austen’s opinion of him must be read in the thinness of its compliments.

Large 4to (287 × 210 mm), printed in Chaucer type in red and black, woodcut frontispiece after Burne-Jones. One of 350 copies on paper. Original limp vellum with silk ties.

Printed in the press’s great final year, with borders that cost Morris more care than the story did. The paper — linen rag, made to a 15th-century Bolognese model — shrugs off a century; the silk ties do not.

8vo (228 × 150 mm), on Japan vellum; crushed levant morocco, the peacock inlaid in 43 pieces of coloured leather, the binders’ stamp and ledger number 2214 to the front doublure.

In the house style whose greatest example went down with the Titanic: the peacock’s tail eyed in gilt, the whole tooled to a density just short of vulgarity — which is precisely where Sangorski liked to stop.