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Provenance:  Pencilled ownership inscriptions of James A. Hoffman, Kutztown (PA), 1877. “Thou shalt not steal.”

•  Sabin 74200; Howes R516.   Contemporary green publisher's cloth with light wear and one spot to back cover. An article, “A Lesson in Pronunciation for Germans” has been affixed to the rear pastedown. A nice clean copy.  (3043)

The outer binding is red textured cloth with the front cover stamped in black and gilt, and the interior front cover sample for the children’s version is a different red textured cloth stamped in black. The leaves for subscribers’information are unused.

•  Not in Arbour. Publisher’s cloth as described above, gently worn with corners rubbed and small scrape to front cover. Interior clean.

This is an untrimmed copy in original boards, with 24 pages of advertising for Carey publications bound in at the front of the volume. The preliminary map, engraved by John Bower, has hand-colored border lines; this American edition does not call for the plates found in the English first, but does include in-text depictions of several “Ethiopic inscriptions.”

•  Shaw & Shoemaker 33864; NSTC 2S3118. Publisher’s quarter tan paper over light blue paper–covered sides; front cover detached and back joint cracked, binding spotted, paper cracked and split along spine, spine label now absent and replaced with hand-inked title, spine with later paper shelving label. Front pastedown with institutional bookplate, front free endpaper with inked ownership inscription dated 1829. Half-title with portion of outer margin torn away (not touching text) and laid in. Map lightly foxed, with two short tears along folds. Pages age-toned, with occasional spots of foxing.

The letter begins: Dear Pinutoyi Istsimokan: Your letter of January 24, about Joe Butch (Henkel). Yes, he is an old timer, but terribly unreliable.” (Unreliable though Henkel may have been, he, too, had a mountain named for him.)

Schultz goes on to tell Grinnell that he is currently writing a story “whenever a lessening of neuritis pain permits.” There are two paragraphs about Eli Guardipee, a Métis, who has been with him for a month helping him with the Blackfeet language. He writes, “I gave him a very pleasant time of it, good room and meals, plenty of good beer, and sent him to a motion picture show nearly every evening. . . . He knows the Blackfeet language better than any mixed blood or white man I ever knew, and loves to dig into the real meaning of its words and expressions.” Other topics include his study of Nahwatosis (or Blackfeet tobacco) and his desire to be called before a Congressional Committee investigating the Indian Bureau.

Grinnell was an anthropologist, naturalist, and significant writer/editor as to the American West; he actually discovered the Montana glacier that bears his name.

•  As it was sent, with some later folds; slight chipping at edges.  (24631)

In our considerable experience, works in Tarascan are considerably rarer than those in Nahuatl, the principal language of central Mexico.

•  Medina, Mexico, 3205; Viñaza 294 (giving wrong date of publication); García Icazbalceta, Lenguas, 70 (also giving wrong date); Palau 309782; Pilling, Proof-sheets, 3572.   Recased in contemporary limp vellum with remnants of ties; some repairs to vellum; vellum cockled and with stains. Modern endpapers. Lacks the title-leaf and the full-page woodcut coat of arms of the dedicatee. Marginal damage to first leaf of front index and to last three leaves (i.e., rear index), repaired. Small loss of perhaps a dozen letters total, all in the indices. Much damaged and priced accordingly — still, textually complete.  (23340)

Provenance:  Front pastedown with presentation bookplate of a Catholic Sunday School in Virginia, dated 1880; front free endpaper with recipient's ownership inscription.

•  Sabin 82267; Pilling, Proof-sheets, 3631; Wagner-Camp 395; Howes D285.   Publisher's green cloth blind-stamped in diapered pattern containing crosses (not in Krupp), spine with elaborate gilt-stamped title and decorations; binding cocked and rubbed, sides with spots of discoloration. Front pastedown and free endpaper as above. Back hinge (inside) reinforced with cloth tape. Pages age-toned, with scattered spotting.  (26581)

•  Rosenbach, Jewish, 131; Shaw & Shoemaker 5067. Not in Singerman Judaica Americana. Contemporary quarter sheep with paper-covered paste boards; heavily worn; joints open and covers almost detached. Early ownership signatures on front and rear pastedowns. Signature torn from upper outer corner of title-page, taking upper parts of three letters. Small Library of Congress duplicate release stamp on verso of title-page.

For more AMERICAN HEBREW
GRAMMARS, click here.

Provenance:  Front fly-leaf with early inked inscription “Sebastian Keller jnr.” Sebastian Keller the second was the son of Catharine Hummer of White Oak, Pennsylvania; Hummer was the first woman to preach among the German Baptist Brethren of Pennsylvania, and famed for her visions of dead people being baptized in Heaven.

•  ESTC W21002; Evans 24771; Arndt & Eck, German Language Printing in the U.S., 853.   Contemporary mottled sheep, covers framed in blind double fillets; binding scuffed and rubbed, spine and front cover with insect damage. Pages browned and intermittently stained as usual with German American imprints; edges of front free endpaper, first few leaves, and back free endpaper tattered. Front fly-leaf with inscription as above.  (26180)

An appendix of examples of Hottentot and Caffre language is also supplied.

The engraved plates include illustrations of a rhinoceros, a hippopotamus, dwarf mice, and Hottentot weaponry, as well as an oversized folding landscape and a map of the territory covered by the author.

•  ESTC T131019. Recently rebound in quarter calf over marbled paper sides, spines with gilt-stamped title labels. Title-page and two others of vol. I stamped by a now-defunct institution; one page with outer margin reinforced. Small hole to map. Title-page of vol. II with topmost left portion of title repaired and replaced in facsimile; title-page and five others stamped. Pagination skips in vol. II from 136 to 139. A few minor spots of foxing to plates; one plate with short edge tear carefully repaired.

•  Publisher's green cloth, front cover and spine stamped in black and orange. A clean, crisp copy.  (23630)

•  Contemporary calf, spine gilt and with red leather label. Leather dry and flaking, with loss over corners, joints open but sewing holding, chipping at head and foot of spine, and crack down center of spine: This volume could split. Ownership inscriptions in ink on front pastedown and reverse of frontispiece. Browning from turn-ins onto endpapers and fly-leaves; light to moderate foxing throughout. All edges speckled red.

•  TPL 5826.   Publisher's printed paper–covered boards, outer corners chipped and a lighter spot to front cover where there once was an old label of some sort affecting one word of type (“Price”); old, light waterstaining (with a darker edge) and some soiling to same cover, with evidence of the onetime moisture visible also to back cover and intermittently in the interior (especially to early leaves). Fragile. (25512)

The text here is in Latin with extensive quotations and citations in Greek, printed shouldernotes, and a 32-page “Supplementum linguae Graecae.” The “Specimen Lexici Hesychiani” is also appended, followed by separate indices for Greek and Latin.

•  VD17 12:121802D.   Contemporary half red sheep in imitation of morocco with marbled paper–covered sides, rubbed; spine with gilt-stamped author/title and gilt-dotted raised bands, faintly sunned with square of ink now obscuring a shelving number. Front pastedown with institutional bookplates, title-page and first text page pressure-stamped, all edges (closed) rubber-stamped, back pastedown rubber-stamped. A few instances of spotting, pages otherwise almost entirely clean. A good sound copy of this book.  (25837)

•  Publisher's wrappers, but clearly removed from a bound volume. (15126)

The oversized, folding maps of France and the world featurehand-colored provincial and continental borders; two additional oversized, steel-engraved plates depict the gods atop Mt. Olympus and the seven wonders of the world.

Early editions of this work are uncommon.

•  Quérard, La France littéraire, 341.   Contemporary marbled paper–covered boards, spines with gilt-stamped leather title-labels; bindings faded and with some soiling/rubbing (most notably to spines). rubbed. Half-title of vol. I, pp. vii/viii of preface, and printed volume labels all bound in at back of vol. II; some signatures of vol. I unopened. Title-pages with traces of mostly effaced inscriptions; first and last few leaves of both volumes very lightly waterstained. One plate with two short tears from lower edge, not touching image. Solid and interesting.  (27048)

guide to Plato's vocabulary and usage

•  Brunet, V, 861; Sandys, II, 457; Schweiger, I, 332. Contemporary paper-covered boards, spine with inked paper label; binding scuffed and rubbed, spine with paper shelving label (inked through), title-label darkened. Front pastedown with 19th-century collector's bookplate, title-page verso with same collector's inked inscription. Light foxing. Final leaf with upper outer corner torn away, with loss of a few letters.

Trost (1588–1636), a professor of theology at Wittenberg, compiled this dictionary and issued it two years after publishing his much-praised edition of the Syriac New Testament with an accompanying Latin translation; the Lexicon was likewise lauded, primarily for its completeness.

This and Trost's Syriac New Testament are among the earliest books printed in Cöthen, Upper Saxony. This is the sole edition of the dictionary and it is uncommon in commerce.

•  Graesse, VII, 103; VD17 12:128565E.   Period-style calf, framed in blind; spine with gilt-stamped leather title-label, blind-tooled decorations in compartments, blind- and gilt-ruled raised bands with blind-tooling continued onto boards, ending in trefoils; signed in blind on lower rear turn-in by Grace Bindings. Title-page institutionally pressure-stamped, dedication with numeral rubber-stamped in lower margin. Pages age-toned; title-page and last two index leaves with moderate staining and spotting (in part from old binding). A strong, handsome book.  (25212)

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mouse-over, for an enlargement.

At the end of this highly important and extremely rare grammar are found a comprehensive index, a short catechism, and instructions on the commandments and the sacraments of the Catholic Church, beingall in Nahuatl. Part One of the text expresses Vetancurt's important insight that Nebrija's classical, early-16th-century paradigm for the study of European languages, specifically Latin and Spanish, had its shortcomings when applied to the major New World language under scrutiny—though in the end he resigns himself to using that five-part organization, which was the one most familiar to his readers.

We note that virtually all bibliographies have failed to state that leaf E1 is misfolioed as 14 (it should be 15 and the error is not corrected subsequently), and that leaf H4 is misfolioed as 19 (that error not affecting the subsequent numbering).

Provenance: Marca de fuego of an unidentified Mexican conventual library.

•  Viñaza 204 (failing to note error in foliation, as do all bibliographies except Graff); Medina, Mexico, 1103; Newberry Library, Indian Linguistics in the Edward E. Ayer Collection, Nahuatl 237; García Icazbalceta, Lenguas, 80; León-Portilla, Tepuztlahcuilolli, 2816; Sabin 99385; Pilling 4002. Graff 4475 (this copy; giving correct collation). On the marcas de fuego, see: Sala, Marcas de fuego, pp. 28 and 39. On Vetancurt, see: Archivo biográfico de España, Portugal, e Iberoamérica, fiche 118, frames 17–36 and 73–74. Contemporary limp vellum, shrunken and cockled, missing pieces along fore-edge of front cover and at base of spine. Some burn holes at tops of some pages resulting from embers’ straying during the branding of the book. Inner margins with expanded openings and occasional tearing around the sewing stations (i.e., paper has suffered from tight binding). Lacks two preliminary leaves containing approbations. Some foxing; last leaf (only) with foremargin insect-eaten. Text of the grammar complete. A significant work seldom acquirable.

This first edition has a title-page in black and red with the printer’s device of the Amsterdam Elzevirs, “Ne Extra Oleas”—showing Minerva with owl and shield next to an olive tree—and it is printed in two columns in roman, italic, Greek, and Hebrew, ornamented with woodcut initials.

•  Willems, Les Elzevier, 1295. On the Vossius, father and son, see: Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, 307–309 and 322–23. Contemporary English calf ruled in blind, bumped and abraded with a little loss on corners and edges; joints fully open at base and some chipping at head and foot of spine. Paper, ink-lettered spine label; inked call number and date on title-page. Pastedowns entirely gone and remnants of a manuscript used as binder’s waste visible at gutters, inside covers; due to the pastedowns’ removal, much of the binder’s construction can readily be examined here. A little light waterstaining and browning to first and last leaves (only). All edges red.

•  Not in Library Company, Afro-Americana (rev. ed.).   Recent red cloth with black leather spine label. Library pressure-stamp (defunct library) in margin of one page. A delicate book, as one must expect given the place and date of publication. Old stab holes in inner margins.  (26097)

This is the sole American edition. First printed in England in 1804.

•  Shaw & Shoemaker 30564; NSTC W2651. Contemporary speckled sheep. Spines divided into compartments by double gilt rules with large red leather title labels and small round black volume labels, both edged with gilt fillets and gilt-lettered. Fine cracking to spines with shallow chipping from head and foot; edges rubbed, corners bumped. Pages with light browning around impression and on edges, with darker browning from turn-ins towards beginning and end of each volume. Large bite from rear free endpaper of vol. II; generally, text problem-free, with but a few shallow tears and chippings and a few light waterstains.