Foreign Literature
Contact Donovan Rees
This department specialises in rare and important works of French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish and South American literature from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.
Here you can find first editions and signed or presentation copies of authors as diverse as Akhmatova, Balzac, Borges, Camus, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Goethe, Goldoni, Hugo, Kafka, Leopardi, Lorca, Manzoni, Pirandello, Pushkin, Schiller, Tolstoy, Zola, and many others. Among the important works which have passed through our hands are the original working manuscript of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, now in the Pushkin House in St Petersburg, the only known copy of the first edition of Brecht's first play, Baal (1920) with his working notes, and an extraordinary collection of Pushkin first editions.
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[ACCADEMIA DELL’ARCADIA.]
Favola di due gatti e della scimia coll’appello de’ medesimi gatti all’orso, divisa in due parti,...
Florence, Bernardo Paperini, 1730.
First combined edition, rare, of two fables in parallel Latin and Italian verse by members of the Roman Accademia degli Arcadi, comprising Due gatti ed una scimia (first 1728) and the first appearance of its sequel, Appello de’ due gatti all’orso.
£475
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[ANON.]
L’Isola de’ solitari o sia il felice a suo dispetto operetta alle donne di spirito italiane.
Pisa, Ranieri Prosperi, 1791.
First and only edition of a very rare, late eighteenth-century social satire, taking a swipe at intellectual academies and society’s ingratitude towards good actions.
£350
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ARIOSTO, Ludovico.
Orlando furioso.
Birmingham, John Baskerville for Pietro Molini and Giovanni Molini, 1773.
A handsomely bound set of the attractive and influential Baskerville edition of Orlando furioso, illustrated with plates by notable eighteenth-century artists, and with an extensive list of prominent subscribers.
£1850
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ARMINESI, Rocco degli.
Attila flagelum Dei, tradotto dalla vera cronica per Rocco degli Arminesi padovano. Ove si narra come detto...
Venice, Omobon Bettanino, [mid-eighteenth century].
Very rare eighteenth-century edition of a popular and best-selling poem on Attila the Hun.
£600
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ARNIGIO, Bartolomeo.
Rime dell’Arnigio per la ill[ustre] signora Claudia Martinenga.
Brescia, Giovanni Battista Bozzola, 1566.
First edition of Bartolomeo Arnigio’s collection of poems addressed to Claudia Martinengo, wife to Ludovico Martinengo della Pallata, an important association copy presented by the author to fellow poet Antonio Beffa Negrini.
£1750
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BARTOLI, Adolfo.
Scenari inediti della Commedia dell’arte. Contributo alla storia del teatro popolare italiano.
Florence, Sansoni, 1880.
Rare first edition, one of only 350 copies, of a foundational source for the study of Commedia dell’Arte. The exceptionally well-loved and widely-performed form of drama is the subject of the author’s pioneering study: he examines tropes, characters, plots, structures and lines of ‘scenarios’...
£500
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BEISNER, Monika.
Dante Alighieri: La Commedia in 100 tavole.
Turin, Attini, 2021.
Limited edition, one of 500 numbered sets, of Monika Beisner’s one hundred illustrations of the Divine Comedy, each accompanying one canto, conveying with remarkable fidelity the vivacity of Dante’s verse.
£50
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BIZZARRI, Pietro.
Petri Bizzari varia opuscula, quorum indicem sequens pagina demonstrabit.
Venice, [Paolo Manuzio], 1565.
First edition of a collection of treatises, verses, and declamations in the classical style by the Italian Protestant scholar and spy Pietro Bizzarri, including two works dedicated respectively to Queen Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots; with contemporary English provenance and manuscript corrections.
£2500
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CASTIGLIONE, Baldassare.
Il libro del cortegiano … nuovamente stampato, & con somma diligentia revisto, con la sua tavola di...
Venice, Gabriele Giolito de’ Ferrari, 1544.
Second Giolito edition of the classic Renaissance manual of courtly behaviour.
£800
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[COLLEGIO DEI NOBILI DI MODENA.]
Il buon’ uso della vittoria, ossia Publio Cornelio Scipione nella nuova Cartagine: azione accademica...
Modena, eredi di Bartolomeo Soliani, [1776].
First edition of a scarce play with music and ballet, prepared and performed by the Collegio dei Nobili di Modena for celebrations of the birthday of Francesco III d’Este, Duke of Modena.
£450
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DELL’UVA, Benedetto.
Le vergini prudenti.
Florence, Bartolomeo Sermartelli, 1582.
First editions of three religious poems in ottava rima by the Capuan monk Benedetto dell’Uva, representative of Counter-Reformation poetry in southern Italy.
£650
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FAERNO, Gabriele.
Fabulae centum ex antiquis auctoribus delectae, carminibus explicatae …
Padua, Giuseppe Comino, [(colophon:) 27 October] 1730.
A collection of popular verse fables by the sixteenth-century scholar Gabriele Faerno of Cremona (c. 1510–1561), in an eighteenth-century patterned paper binding.
£300
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FAGNANI, Giovanni Marco.
De bello Arriano libri sex.
Milan, heirs of Pacifico da Ponte and Giovanni Battista Piccaglia, 1604.
First and only edition of the sole published work by the Italian nobleman Giovanni Marco Fagnani (1524–1609), an epic poem recounting Ambrose of Milan’s campaign against local Arians in late fourth-century Lombardy.
£900
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[GIRALDI, Giovanni Battista.]
Giuditio sopra la tragedia di Canace et Macareo con molte utili considerationi circa l’arte tragica,...
(Colophon:) Lucca, Vincenzo Busdraghi, 4 May 1550.
First edition of this criticism, in the form of a dialogue, of Speroni’s play Canace et Macareo, which sparked one of the most remarkable literary debates of the time. The text was previously attributed to Bartolomeo Cavalcanti, but the authorship of Giraldi is now generally accepted. The full text...
£650
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GOLDONI, Carlo.
Scelta di alcune commedie. Per uso de’ dilettanti della lingua italiana. Prima edizione italiana.
Livorno, Assunto Barbani, 1816.
First edition printed in Italy of a collection of ten comedies by Goldoni, selected for their lack of complicated syntax and lack of Venetian dialect and idioms, published in Livorno for the benefit of the English community.
£175
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GONZAGA, Curzio.
Il Fido amante, poema eroico.
Mantua, [(colophon:) Giacomo Ruffinello, 1582].
First edition of Curzio Gonzaga’s captivating chivalric poem in thirty-six cantos, much appreciated by his friend Tasso and published the year after the first authorised edition of the Gerusalemme liberata.
£600
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[GUARINI, Giovanni Battista.]
Il Pastor Fido.
‘In Parigi, appresso Tomaso Iolly, 1706’.
Scarce Parisian edition of Guarini’s immensely popular ‘pastoral tragi-comedy’, charmingly illustrated by Antonio Luciani.
£175
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LEWIS, Wyndham.
Ezra Pound, un saggio e tre disegni.
Milan, all’insegna del pesce d’oro [Scheiwiller], 1958.
First edition, an hors serie copy (from numbered edition of 1000), a translation by Pound’s daughter, Mary de Rachewiltz, of an essay that first appeared in Pound’s 65th birthday festschrift in 1950; this translation was published in part ‘to celebrate Ezra Pound’s return to Italy’.
£75
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MARINO, Giambattista; Gasparo MURTOLA.
La Murtoleide fischiate del cavalier Marino con la Marineide risate del Murtola.
‘Norinbergh’ [i.e. Venice], Ioseph Stamphier, 1619.
Rare first edition of these Baroque burlesque sonnets presenting both sides of the bitterly satirical literary feud between the leading Italian Baroque poet Giambattista Marino and his adversary, Gasparo Murtola, containing Marino’s celebrated argument that the aim of the poet is to inspire wonder.
£900
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MELECRINIS, Maria Teresa.
Le voci del cuore a Maria Teresa Melecrinis dei baroni di Ioppolo e Coccorino che a di 6 luglio 1846...
Naples, stamperia dell' Iride, 1846.
Very rare collection of odes and sonnets composed to mark the entry of Maria Teresa Melecrinis into the Benedictine monastery of San Paolo at Sorrento.
£175