[Rarebooks] fa: HISTOIRE DES ORDRES MILITAIRES OU DES CHEVALIERS 1721 - 4 Vols./187 PLATES

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, along with other illustrated works, auctions ending Sunday, February 3. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/ba9hgsg

Thanks,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.

Histoire des Ordres Militaires ou des Chevaliers, Des Milices Seculières & Regulieres de l'un & de l'autre Sexe, qui ont ete etablies jusques a present... Amsterdam: Pierre Brunel, 1721. First edition thus. Four volumes, small 8vo (18 cm), recently rebound in terracotta buckram; xxxii, [16], 163, [11], 254 pp.; 441, [1] pp.; 471, [1] pp.; 439, [21] pp.; with the half-title pages;  woodcut initials and decorations, 187 engraved plates.

A history of European military orders (Knights Templar, etc.), profusely and elegantly illustrated. The first volume also includes Jacques Basnage's controversial moral essay on dueling, Dissertation Historique sur les Duels et les Ordres de Chevalrie (with a separate title-page dated 1720).

Ex-reference library, but not obnoxiously so: library bookplates to front endpapers; ink stamps to versos of half-titles and titles and to the margins of the first and last pages of text, but no stamps or marks to any plates. Small area of worming throughout vol. II (mostly one or two small wormholes, but a bit larger on 20 leaves or so); occasional light damp-staining to the bottom margins, occasional small spots, a few short edge-tears; otherwise contents are unusually clean and fresh and firmly bound in library cloth bindings that appear virtually as new.