Choiseul-Gouffier accompanied the Marquis de Chabert’s 1776 expedition to chart the eastern Mediterranean. He and the artist J.B. Hilaire explored the islands of the Archipelago, the coast of Asia Minor and parts of mainland Greece. His account of their travels, the first volume of Voyage Pittoresque, was an immediate success and in 1784, in the wake of its publication, Choiseul-Gouffier was appointed ambassador to Constantinople where he was able to continue his researches. After the Revolutionary government deprived him of office in 1792 he found it prudent to spend several years of exile in Russia, but in 1802 returned to France to resume work on the second volume. He died in 1817 and the work was completed posthumously by Barbie du Bocage.

Paulus Manutius, the son of Aldus, established a reputation for himself as a Ciceronian scholar and after he took over the press at the end of the 1530s Cicero dominated the list of Aldine publications. There were a number of editions of the Epistolae Familiares, but as Renouard mentions, they are found less frequently than those written to Atticus. Renouard presumed that this was beacuse they were read and reread as models of Ciceronian style. This edition has a revised text and an additional leaf of scholia discussing earlier editions., Renouard p. 127 (1543, 3). Brunet II, 46.

Claudian was the last great pagan poet writing in Latin (though probably born in Greek-speaking Alexandria), writing at the end of the fourth century. His most notable surviving work is his epic poem De raptu Proserpinae.

First (and only STC edition) of the first letter of St.Clement to the Corinthians (together with the surviving fragment of the second, now thought to be a homily by another author) and also the first edition of the Latin translation by Patrick Young, royal librarian to James I and Charles I. The innovative (and - from a type-setting point of view - highly complex) printing in red indicates where text has been supplied by Young to fill lacunae in the original manuscript (the celebrated Codex Alexandrinus which was presented to Charles I by the Patriarch of Constantinople through the agency of Thomas Roe). Clement was one of the earliest Bishops of Rome, c. 92-99 AD, and his letter to the Cornithian church is the only surviving work which can be ascribed to him with confidence. As such it is one of the earliest Christian documents extant and sheds important light on the early church., STC 5398; Madan I, 166.

From ‘Great Britain’s Coasting Pilot’, the first English Sea Atlas based upon personal survey which was first printed in 1693 and issued for a full century afterwards, with some additions and corrections.

This is the first van Staveren edition; his revised edition was published almost forty years later., Dibdin II, 246.

Cyril’s catechsimical lectures shed invaluable light on the preparation for baptism and liturgical practices in the fourth-century church. “La belle édition greque et latine de ce Père.”, Brunet II, 463.

Doppelmayr’s Celestial Atlas was printed by the Homann Heirs in 1742, but this is a much earlier example of one of J.B. Homann’s plates included in one of his first atlases. This map shows the orbits of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn around the Sun, derived from a hypothesis of Tycho Brahe, for the years 1701 to 1730.