Search Results: Authors starting with V from Honey & Wax Booksellers

Madrid: Saturnino Calleja Fernandez, 1900. First edition of this Spanish pocket guide to health and fitness, part of Saturnino Calleja Fernández's "Biblioteca Popular" series. The book offers a visual introduction to calisthenics, featuring dynamic illustrations in which dotted lines indicate movements of the limbs. The prescribed exercises require no equipment, and can be performed anywhere, at any time: "Nuestro sistema, por tanto, carece de aparejos, puesto que cada uno los lleva consigo, pudiendo ejercitarse sin fatiga á la hora que mejor parezca y en el sitio que más convenga." The colorful cover, featuring a muscular woman hoisting a dumbbell and boys swinging from a trapeze, is therefore misleading, but the graphic appeal of this little book is characteristic of the ephemeral educational works for which Saturnino Calleja Fernández was known: the Madrid publisher issued enormous runs of inexpensive, portable volumes to schools, playing a particularly important role in impoverished areas of… Read More

Neuchâtel: Delachaux & Niestlé S.A., Éditeurs, 1916. Signed limited edition of a scarce title on ancient Egyptian textiles, numbered 77 of 125 copies, signed by the authors on the colophon, and published as part of the series Mémoires d'Archéologie et d'Ethnographie Comparées. (An additional twenty-five lettered copies were printed, not intended for sale.) The book's line drawings and tipped-in color plates, along with a sample sheet reproducing five woven silk bands of the period, display the breadth and skill of early Egyptian through Coptic weavers, highlighting their characteristic use of materials, colors, and patterns. The authors argue that the ancient Egyptians used tablets ("cartons," or cards) as their primary weaving device, a technology used in 1200-1500 BCE Europe and Scandinavia. This theory has been disproven: the Egyptians did, in fact, use looms. Text in French. BnF 1199; 5515. A very nearly fine copy of a key visual sourcebook of Egyptian textile design in its highly… Read More

New York: New York Times, 1926. Four large original watercolors by George Van Werveke for the New York Times Book Review, published in 1925 and 1926. Headlining the fiction section, Van Werveke's historical scenes provided a counterpoint to the modern American titles reviewed below, offering amusing glimpses of English and French literary history. Each illustration catches a writer at a charged or revealing personal moment. The first, published on May 31, 1925, depicts the seventeenth-century diarist John Evelyn amid the chaos of his trashed house, as he consults with the architect Christopher Wren. The published headline read: "Lusty Monarch Ruins Fair Home of Famous Diarist. After John Evelyn Had Sublet to Peter the Great (During Peter's Visit to England), He Had to Call in Sir Christopher Wren to Repair the Damage." The second, published on January 24, 1926, shows the historian George Grote examining his future wife on the reading he assigned her, while her father stews. The published headline… Read More

San Francisco: Norman Publishing, 1998. Uncut illustrated sheet from William Frank Richardson's 1998 English translation of the first book of Vesalius's 1543 De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body), vividly hand-marbled by Richard J. Wolfe. The anatomical images featured are full-length side and rear views of the human skeleton. Publisher Jeremy Norman commissioned these marbled sheets for use as endpapers in the deluxe limited issue of the book. A fine example. Single uncut sheet, measuring 23 x 17.5 inches, printed with text and anatomical images from De Humani Corporis Fabrica, hand-marbled in blue, yellow, and pink.