Londres (Gb)

First pressing of the Red China record, retaining all its original characteristics (blank A- and B-side labels).

Rare autograph inscription signed by Joe Strummer, the singer and frontman of the punk band, to journalist Bruno Charoy, photographer and rock guitarist.

Complete with its original printed sleeve, illustrated with images of the band and the record title in Chinese ideograms, together with its plain paper inner sleeve.

Expected light creasing to the sleeve corners, upper and lower edges partially unglued, not affecting overall condition.

First edition illustrated with in-text engravings and 15 plates, including a folding map and 2 hand-coloured plates.

Full polished calf binding, attractively marbled in shades of tan, the spine expertly restored and decorated in gilt with floral and foliate tools and gilt fillets, red morocco title label, gilt rolls at head and tail, double gilt fillets framing the covers, gilt fillet borders, marbled edges, contemporary binding.

Tears and losses to leaves 281–82 and 283–84 (with loss of text) have been carefully repaired; a few scattered spots.

John Davy (1790–1868), military physician and chemist, served with the British forces stationed in India as Inspector-General of Hospitals, and in that capacity resided in Ceylon from 1816 to 1820.

His account is among the earliest published after the British seized this former Dutch colony (1796–1814, following a war against the princes ruling the island’s central region), and it was never reissued thereafter.

First UK edition of Hemingway's masterpiece, in its unclipped original dust jacket (printed price: 18s. net). The first US edition preceded this publication by only a few weeks.

Publisher’s full brown cloth, dust jacket with inevitable and minute corner tears; neat repairs to the verso of the dust jacket at head and tail of spine. Ownership inscription on title page.

A rare copy of Hemingway's famous autobiographical account of his early years in Paris between 1921 and 1926, published posthumously nearly forty years after the events described. 

New collected edition of the works of Montesquieu.

Illustrated with a fine frontispiece portrait by de Sève and engraved by Littret, appearing here for the first time in its first state, along with two folding maps in the first volume.

Contemporary full marbled calf bindings, spines with raised bands with gilt compartments, floral gilt tooling, and guilloché tooling on the bands, red morocco title labels and green morocco volume labels, boards framed in gilt with floral cornerpieces, gilt tooling on board edges, marbled edges; rubbing to edges and corners, one corner of vol. I worn, some scuffing, small wormtrack with a lack of leather on the front board of vol. I, minor marginal stain on the plate of vol. I and on p. 1 of vol. II, as well as p. 667 of vol. III.

A handsome contemporary binding copy of Montesquieu's works, expanded with the 'Lettres familières'. The edition was prepared by François Richer with the assistance of Montesquieu’s son, based on the author’s manuscripts.

First edition. One of the 1250 copies printed. 15 engravings and 38 tables in the text. Complete with the index and the publisher's catalogue at rear.

Publisher's green cloth binding by Simpson & Renshaw, expertly restored and retinted, spine decorated and lettered in gilt, boards decorated in blind, dark brown endpapers slightly faded. Some scattered foxing. Slight damp mark to the upper margin of the first hundred leaves. Some pencil annotations.

Rare and precious autograph inscription by Charles Darwin on the title page: “With the compliments of the author.”

Charles Darwin wrote three major books on plant reproduction. The most important titled The Different Forms of Flowers concludes more than 40 years of studies on floral biology. This seminal work is one of the first scientific tests of the theory of evolution. Darwin demonstrates here how the astonishing structural variety of flowers initially results from natural selection; the immobility of plants and their need for pollen vectors (animals, wind, water) leading to floral adaptation.

“Here is a book on the different forms of flowers in plants of the same species. Beware of the simplicity of this title, it carries serious questions concerning biology, disrupts physiological conceptions hitherto admitted as certain, and reshapes main elements of a science. At the first steps taken with Ch. Darwin into new fields introduced by this book, one perceives not only that peculiar feeling one experiences in approaching the unknown, but the strangeness of the facts revealed is even less impressing than the collapse of convenient and classical conceptions occurring in our minds.” (Amédée Coutance, preface to the first French edition)

“The wonderful diversity of the means for gaining the same end [cross-fertilisation] […] depends on the nature of all the previous changes through which the species had passed, and on the more or less complete inheritance of the successive adaptations of each part to the surrounding conditions” (Darwin, The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species, p. 258)

Both inspired by his grandfather Erasmus Darwin, author of an important botanical work, and his father's tropical plants collection, Darwin's early interest in the complexity of the plant world undoubtedly contributed to his first questions about the diversity of life.
Darwin's most influential mentors were also two botanists: his teacher John Stevens Henslow and his longtime friend Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, first scientist to support Darwin's hypothesis, who recognized “a gradual change of species may well have taken place”. According to Spencer C. H. Barrett, “they no doubt encouraged Darwin to consider plants as suitable subject material for evaluating his developing ideas on variation and evolution”.
Future author of the Origin of Species Charles Darwin began his in-depth study of plants to evaluate the relevance of his theory after settling at Down House (Kent) in 1842. Plants were easy to grow and amenable to direct observation and experimentation. Darwin had seeds sent to him from many parts of the world, allowing him to study the subject in all its diversity to ensure the universality of his conclusions. Spencer C. H. Barrett, in “Darwin's legacy: the forms, function and sexual diversity of flowers” (in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 12 February 2010) notes the importance of this work on Darwin's most acclaimed study: “Finally, as is evident from their increasing inclusion in later editions of the Origin of Species, plants provided outstanding subjects for evaluating his ideas on the evolution of adaptation and the importance of outcrossing for maintaining variation.” Shortly before publishing his Origin of Species he confessed in a letter to J. D. Hooker on 3 June 1857, that he found 'any proposition more readily tested in botanical works… than zoological'.

In his autobiography, Darwin again showed the fundamental importance of Forms of Flowers concluding forty years of scientific efforts to support the most revolutionary theory of the 19th century. Even today, it remains an influential and remarkably durable contribution on floral function and the evolution of mating systems.

“In [1877] The Different Forms of Flowers, & c. appeared and in 1880 a second edition. This book consists chiefly of the several papers on Heterostyled flowers originally published by the Linnean Society, corrected, with much new matter added together with observations on some other cases in which the same plant bears two kinds of flowers. As before remarked, no little discovery of mine ever gave me so much pleasure as the making out the meaning of heterostyled flowers” (Darwin, Autobiography, in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, p. 78)

A rare, inscribed copy of this seminal work on plant reproduction, adaptation, and evolution.


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