Publication of this French plan coincides with the last great (and ultimately unsuccessful) siege of the Rock undertaken by the French and Spanish 1779-83, when the American War of Independence had diverted British resources elsewhere.

Lucian was a versatile and erudite writer who satirized most of the popular literary genres of the second century AD. His biting wit has survived the centuries, and his innovative prose narrative A True Story - which features a voyage to the moon and interplanetary warfare - is often described as the world's first science fiction novel. The translator Jakob Moltzer (1503-58) was a friend of Camerarius and one of the great German Hellenists of the sixteenth century, becoming professor of Greek at Heidelberg. He took the Latinized form of his name from the poor cobbler in Lucian’s Gallus. The other translators referred to anonymously on the title-page are Erasmus, Melanchton and Thomas More.

Dibdin II, 201.

John Gillies (1747-1836) succeeded William Robertson as royal historiographer for Scotland in 1794. The present work was his first substantial publication, and he is best remembered for a hsitory of Greece published in 1786 which ran into numerous editions and was translated into French and German. W. Zachs, The First John Murray (1998), no. 193.

“The one outstanding work on medieval municipal history which appeared in England before the 19th century” (Douglas: English Scholars). The claim on the title, “taken from records”, is the key to Madox’s importance as a scholar. Madox (1666-1727, legal antiquary and historiographer royal) made critical studies of mediaeval English documents that established him as the virtual founder of British administrative history and a precursor of modern scholarship. Firma Burgi itself is the medieval practice whereby a local magnate paid a fixed fee to the king in return for rights to collect revenues from a borough - which he then did as profitably as possible. The work is dedicated to King George I.

Adams 38/65

Adams 38/92

Adams 38/31

D’Après de Mannevillette (1707-1780) was a practical seaman as well as a mapmaker; his sea atlas was published in Paris in 1745 with the backing of the Academie des Sciences under the title Le Neptune Oriental. He continued to revise and augment his charts over the next thirty years, and issued an expanded version of the Atlas and a supplement 1775-81.

Wife of Michael Melville, the Registrar of the Mixed Court, Helen Melville was one of a handful of European women settled, with her children, on the fever-ridden West African coast in the 1840s. British interest in West Africa declined between the Napoleonic Wars and the mid nineteenth century and the government came very close to withdrawing completely from the region. Melville's account, edited by her cousin, opens with an impassioned plea for the future of the West African Squadron, which operated from Freetown with the express purpose of suppressing the slave trade. Unsurprisingly Melville is greatly concerned with climate and disease, but her descriptions of landscape and people are heavily suffused with philanthropic and abolitionist sentiments typical of her age, and if anything are rather rosy.

The only known map engraved by Gerard Mercator's grandson (also known for his engraving of the Drake silver medal while resident in London in 1589). First published in Duisburg, 1595, it shows North and South America within a sphere, with a large New Guinea and, Terra Australis Nondum Cognita

In the 1630s Jan Cloppenburgh published a series of editions of Mercator’s Atlas Minor which have become scarce. The maps were engraved by Pieter van den Keere and are distinctively larger than the preceeding examples.