Everyone has bad days, even Coleridge, who, in a fit of despair, planned to 'bid farewell forever' to poetry at the age of twenty-two. This unpublished autograph letter marks a key moment of transition in the poet's life. bit.ly/Q-Coleridge2...

🕰️ This beautifully printed collection of 71 shorter works by Thomas Aquinas was published 535 years ago #onthisday. 📖 THOMAS AQUINAS; Antonius PIZAMANUS, editor. Opuscula [with a life of St Thomas].Venice, Hermannus Liechtenstein, 7 September 1490.

The Internet informs us that today is #InternationalBaconDay … they did mean English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1626), right?

👋 Just one week until the York Book Fair opens! Come say hello at Stand 30 – register for complimentary tickets here: yorkbookfair.com/complimentar... Where: Stand 30, Knavesmire Suite, York Racecourse, York YO23 1EX When: Friday 12 September and Saturday 13 September

'Hateful day when I received life! Cursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?' Mary Shelley, born 228 years ago #OTD, developed a keen interest in galvanism and the reanimation of the dead whilst writing Frankenstein. bit.ly/Q-Creve-H5445 🧵

You've heard of Faust & Werther, but did you know that Goethe was also the author of a play about a throuple? Written at the age of 27, Stella (1776) ends with Stella, Cecilia, and Fernando finding love in 'one home, one bed, and one grave'. bit.ly/Q-Goethe-G1181

Fun ways to spend your bank holiday: - Cooking for friends and family (note: cooking friends and family generally frowned upon) - Stealing a large pig and replacing it with a pig-shaped decoy - Glaring at cyclists who don't stop at red lights - Having a night on the town

Happy Women in Translation month! This unpublished manuscript translation of the 1788 French pastoral romance Estelle was produced by a woman for a female friend in the early nineteenth century. (1/3 🧵 )

524 years ago today in Milan, Giovanni Angelo Scinzenzeler printed this volume of Juvenal's satires for the papermaker, bookseller, and publisher Giovanni da Legnano. bit.ly/Q-Juvenal-G2...

Today is Assumption Day! This very rare devotional work, printed in Rome in 1735, is dedicated to the Assumption of Mary into Heaven and guides the reader on a nine-day journey toward the Feast of the Assumption.

New acq

God I so love the @quaritch1847.bsky.social Q on a parcel.

In his diary in 1896, member of @theul.bsky.social staff Charles Sayle called this portrait ‘quite the most marvellous piece of engraving of the period that … I have seen’.

How we're feeling in this heat wave 🥵 This slumping scholar is the poet and playwright William Cartwright (1611–1643), a favourite of Charles I and a follower of Ben Jonson, who said that Cartwright 'writes like a man'.

"Home is where the books are".. Richard Burton

Silk, embroidery, enamel, silver filigree, and more ... which of these lovely little bindings is your favourite?

Happy Book Lovers Day 📚 at Quaritch, we've been book lovers for a good 178 years (and counting)!

How it started / how it's going ...

Big day for Machiavelli apologists ... #OTD in 1794, the soldier & politician Giovanni Battista Baldelli Boni gave a speech in Florence defending the author of The Prince; Ugo Foscolo would call Baldelli 'the only one who did justice to so great a man' (trans.). bit.ly/Q-Baldelli-H...

'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all'. #HappyBDay to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, born #OTD in 1809. He continued working on In Memoriam, written after the death of his beloved friend Arthur Henry Hallam, for 17 years, one of the most moving evocations of loss in English.

Always a pleasure to see you (and Sancho, of course)!

Here is a Chrestien Wechel one ...

Chonky manicule in my copy of St Jerome’s ‘Epistolæ’ (Letters), printed at #Venice in 1496 by Johannes Rubeus Vercellensis.

1548 woodcut initials featuring dog-walking, hair-pulling, spanking, music-making, and what seems to be a very dramatic book club ...

🌹 Happy #WorldEmbroideryDay! This charming almanack, Les étrennes à la rose, ou le rosier d’amour (‘rosebush of love’) collects amatory poems using the motif of the rose, bound in red silk embroidered in silver and dated with the French Revolutionary year 'An XII' (1804). bit.ly/Q-Almanack-A...

This portrait of the Basel printer Johann Froben (1460–1527) after Hans Holbein keeps an eye on our Human Sciences department, containing a wide range of books & manuscripts on economics philosophy, law, politics, & more. Books printed *by* Froben live one floor up, in our Continental department ...

Johann Sebastian Bach died of a stroke #onthisday in 1750 following complications from eye surgery. This hugely influential anthology of German songs, Sperontes singende Muse, features two pieces ascribed to him, 'Ich bin nun, wie ich bin' and 'Dir di Liebe, werthes Hertze'. bit.ly/Q-Scholze-C2...

#OTD in 1567, Mary, Queen of Scots, was formally deposed & forced to abdicate the Scottish throne in favour of her one-year-old son, James. Read more about her subsequent flight to England, trial, & execution in Courtship, Slander, and Treason by Arthur and Janet Ing Freeman: bit.ly/Q-Freeman-U66

Today in 'things at Quaritch that just make sense' ... this nineteenth-century chromolithographed facsimile of the Ghent Altarpiece by Jan and Hubert Van Eyck. (It lives in our Front Room and is lovingly opened by one of our booksellers in the morning and closed in the evening ...) (1/2)🧵

Happy St Swithin's Day!  According to tradition, today's weather will continue for the next 40 days and 40 nights: 'St Swithin's Day, if it does rain / Full forty days, it will remain / St Swithin's Day, if it be fair / For forty days, t'will rain no more'. We're hoping for a bit more sunshine ...

Sir Thomas More died 490 years ago on 6 July. Our catalogue Nowhere (Utopia literally meaning 'no place'), a selection of utopias, dystopias, and imaginary voyages, celebrates the legacy of his monumental 1516 Utopia. Browse the catalogue: bit.ly/Q-Utopia2025

Erasmus died #OTD in 1536. This 1517 Noctes Atticae was heavily annotated by a 16thc reader who makes extensive reference to the lectures of Paolo Bombasi, regarded by Erasmus as 'the best of friends' and cited in the 1508 edition of his Adagia. bit.ly/Q-Gellius-G3...

Did you know that Jorge Luis Borges mentions us in his 1940 story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius? To this day we continue to encounter visitors who have come across Quaritch through Borges, eager to see our shop (and our famous catalogues) for themselves …

Plates and wheels on the bottom sides and edge of an enormous antiphonal, Madrid 1827. Seen at @quaritch1847.bsky.social. Outing with our London Rare Book School group.

Happy birthday to Peter Paul Rubens, 'the most versatile and influential Baroque artist of northern Europe in the 17th century' (Grove), born #onthisday in 1577!

Happy birthday to Anna Akhmatova, born #OTD in 1889! In addition to her prolific output at as a poet, she also published six volumes of translations during her lifetime, although she complained that for a poet translating was ‘comparable to devouring one’s own brains’ ... bit.ly/Q-Akhmatova-...

🌞 Happy Summer Solstice! BRANDT, Bill. Stonehenge: after Thomas Hardy. c. 1946. bit.ly/Q-Brandt-P422

Can confirm that elevenses are a daily occurrence (we also ring a little bell to summon our hungry antiquarian booksellers)

A sneek peek of our June roundup of new acquisitions, featuring tales of chivalry & naughty novels, Marian books &missionary books, prayerbooks & anti-Protestant propaganda, and patterned papers, manuscript waste, and much more. Sign up to receive our catalogues: bit.ly/Q-stayintouch

👋 Coucou, tout le monde! We will be at the Paris Rare Book & Graphic Arts Fair this week (12–15 June) at Stand B8, with a selection of books guaranteed to boost your joie de vivre: bit.ly/Q-Paris2025

A pair of happy birds sitting in the margin of Josephus’ Antiquitates Judaicæ (Lübeck, 1475-76). In the library of the Earls of Sunderland at Blenheim Palace, sold in 1882 to @quaritch1847.bsky.social, from whom likely bought by William Morris. Now @theulspeccoll.bsky.social Inc.1.A.14.1[1013.1-2].

All the links you could ever need ... inspired by Girolamo Canini's very handy 1621 diagrams on the ideal courtier: bit.ly/Q-May2025 📕 REFUGE, Eustace de; Girolamo CANINI, translator. Trattato della corte ... tradotto di francese in questo nostro volgare. Venice, Giovanni Battista Ciotti, 1621.

Our latest new acquisitions list features works on duelling, drawing, & dowries for spinsters; translations by painters, prodigies, poets, and priests; annotated grammars, histories, and armorials; a manual for courtiers, a London guidebook for children, and much more besides 🌷 bit.ly/Q-May2025

🌞 The view from Q on this sunny Friday afternoon

Beautiful botanical details inside & out in this recent acquisition from @quaritch1847.bsky.social: Henrietta Moriarty's 'Viridarium: coloured plates of greenhouse plants' (London, 1806), produced in part to free her from destitution after the early death of her dissolute husband. CUL 8000.d.1621.

Quite thrilled with this new acquisition from @quaritch1847.bsky.social. A 1479 edition of Augustinus de Ancona's treatise on papal power with many fantastic layers of material evidence 1/5

Honoured to be invited to sign the Sotherans visitors’ book @firstsrarebooks.bsky.social this evening. Early entries include Ted Dring (long term @quaritch1847.bsky.social employee) and Winifred Myers (second woman President of the ABA).

Coming with us to Firsts tomorrow is Henrietta Maria Moriarty's Viridarium, a pioneering horticultural work by an impoverished botanist, draughtswoman, and novelist, produced to support her four children after her husband's death. Read more (item 59 in our fair catalogue): bit.ly/Q-Firsts2025...

We are delighted to present a selection of seventy-five highlights for Firsts: London’s Rare Book Fair 2025. We hope to see many of you at the fair, where we will be at Stand I81 on the first floor! Browse the catalogue: bit.ly/Q-Firsts2025 Complimentary tickets: bit.ly/Q-firsts2025...