book on boats

That's a really (waxing Anglo-Anglophone) lovely book, @akeady, with magnificent correspondences to the plates.
...One fun thing jumps out; wish you could stop me. Jacob Tonson, one of the publishers (/'booksellers') on the title page, was also partly responsible for the Spectator and Tatler essays (right, by Addison and Steele), in their original, periodical formats along with early collected editions, along with some contemporary stuff of Swift's.
The facsimile edition of Sir Thomas Smith is very cool, too. That's looking more like the earlier, relatively decipherable phases of the 'Secretary' hand, more consistently identified with the Elizabethan period than the earlier, more user-friendly versions of Italic. ...It was only later in the 17th century that people got tired of Secretary, and evolved modern cursive hands, as a kind of stylistic compromise between that and Italic,

 

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My oldest book is History of the United States, Vol 2, 1883

where is vol 1? No idea...

 

@hotwheelsearl, weird that you should bring up the subject of incomplete sets.
In the, what, mid-late '80s, there was this one bookstore that I could get to on a Saturday, after a long bus ride. The bookstore happened to coincide with the the best academic library I ever had access to, in a different but (from there) easily accessible part of town.
...Sorry; point being, the bookstore was literally three or four floors of brilliantly, may we say, selectively organized chaos.* Going there was something vaguely between a flea market and an archeological dig. That's how I wound up with incomplete sets of all kinds of 18th-century stuff, in English, some of it from London, some from Dublin, but all in what was left of the original calf bindings.
*I'm sure they spotted all the first editions of, say, Faulkner and Steinbeck. ...Can't fault 'em....

 

@Andrew McCabe @akeady I love your books. One of my hobbies is old book collecting, although I have nothing going back as far as the 1500s. However, I very often come across numismatic references or illustrations in some historical books which is very interesting. Imagine what a cool provenance it would be to recognise a coin you own in such an old book. Here are some very few examples form the many I have found. They come from books from the early 1700s.

 

Beautiful book, Andrew. A few years back I was collecting early printing, and I especially liked the Renaissance portrayal of Classical history - the costumes and weapons are charming, if not at all accurate.

Here is Livy on Battle of Cannae - jousting with lances and plate armor!:

Titus Livius History of Rome, a 1533 German edition, printed by Mainz by Johann Schoeffer. Leaf features a woodcut by either Hans Schauflein or Hans Burkmair. Leaf measures 11-13/16” x 8”. Woodcut measures 5-5/8” x 5-3/4”. The text refers to Terentius Varro and L. Aemilius Paulus, the two Roman consuls who fought and lost the battle of Cannae in 216 BC against Hannibal. The woodcut appears to be a view of the Battle of Cannae in the upper part, with a scene below showing the capture of the 10,000-man Roman detachment originally sent to surprise the Cartheginian camp. (ref. Harper’s Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquities, article on Hannibal, 1896)

Here is Alexander the Great-era troop transport (an elephant):


Woodcut leaf from Cosmographia (c. 1560) by Sebastian Münster. Latin edition.

 

Since @hotwheelsearl 's book is from 1883, are you referring to yourself going the bookstore in the 1880's?
I thought that I was slightly older than you...

 

@Alegandron, I've been here all of ten minutes, and you've got me chuckling already! Gotta be a new record....

 

LIFE should always be a Chuckle!

 

Thats a book I want, the 1533 Livy illustration of battle of Cannae. I'll watch out for it!

 

These are lovely books. Books from the 1500s, at least after about 1540, are often no more expensive than those 200 years later

 

I wouldn't call myself a "collector" of old books per se -- I just like to buy them now and then when they appeal to me, pursuant to no particular plan, although I do have a fondness for reference books (including almanacs and encyclopedias), travel books (Baedeker's and others), intact atlases when I can find them (I also have a collection of old maps), 19th century etiquette books and household guides, 19th century Japanese woodblock print books (and woodblock prints alone), plus old medical books and books on human behavior. I started doing that in my mid-teens, so in the last (almost) 50 years, I've managed to accumulate hundreds of books published in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The oldest illustration from a book I have is the (hand-colored) woodcut on the page on France from the Weltchronik of Hartmann Schedel, usually known in English as the Nuremberg Chronicle, published in 1493. It's certainly one of the best-known incunabula (i.e., printed books published before 1500). I have it framed on a wall, so I took this photo through the glass. Note that there are two small boats in the pond, so the woodcut technically meets the strictures of this thread:



I probably have more than a dozen maps and city views taken from atlases that were published in the 1500s and 1600s, mostly so-called "miniature maps."

Here's one that's not technically a miniature map, a city view taken from a book published in 1549, showing the city of Freiburg in Breisgau, which is located in southern Baden but belonged to the Habsburgs for a long time. Part of my family probably lived there before Jews were expelled from Freiburg in the mid-1400s; a number of them, including my great-great-grandparents, moved back after Jews were "emancipated" and the ban was lifted in the 1860s, 400 years later.



Here's a map of "Modern Rome" by Mallet, also from an atlas, published in 1683. Note the tiny illustrations of the Colosseum and other structures:



The oldest complete atlas I have dates from 1795, and the oldest complete books of any kind all date from the 1700-1750 period.

The oldest coin book I have, An Essay on Medals by John Pinkerton, dates from 1784, and is substantially devoted to ancient coins:



Sadly, it has no illustrations. But here are the first eight pages of the price guide at the back of the book. (Note the prices given on the second page for the Eid Mar, in both gold and silver.)

 

This 1493 Incunabula is beautiful Donna and indeed there's a little ship on the pond actually looking rather large compared to the small body of water its in!


This thread has developed excellently. I'd no idea that so many ppl had interests in and in many cases examples of Antiquarian books with illustrations directly or tangentially related to old coins

 

Especially to @Only a Poor Old Man, @Marsyas Mike, and @DonnaML, I've been scared of anything that smells like "appropriation" of this thread, but your books are
All,
Mag
Smegging (not even a recognized bad word, in American English; hence "legal")
Nificent.
I have a couple of single leaves, back to one inculabula and one or two from a 16th-century printing of the Nuremberg Chronicle.
(...Hate it, but once it's been done, why argue? As @Ryro put it just lately, on the first post of the thread, https://www.cointalk.com/threads/th...dal-and-minerva-stops-by.373736/#post-5444559 :
I would like to mention that I don't support the altering and vandalizing of most coins, especially ancient or historically important. But if it's been done already I'm not going to stop enjoying something that's cool.)
...Granted that I'm saying, 'Teacher, I raise my hand' to everything @Ryro said, there aren't any easily findable pics of those. But while I forget the printing (not first; confidently c. mid-16th c.), the leaves from the Nuremberg Chronicle still have the original, sweetly detailed woodcuts. ...The level of stylization necessitated by the medium is, to verge on the synergistic, almost lyrical. ...Like, for instance, 19th c. ACE woodcuts by Hokusai and Hiroshige. (...Of which, Thank you, I've got Exactly None!!!!)

 

I had to look up that word you used. I've encountered a lot of British slang (snogging, I've heard of), but not that one. It doesn't sound very pleasant, I'm afraid!

My page from the Nuremberg Chronicle was purchased as from the original, but who knows? I certainly can't tell. And I didn't pay a huge amount, so it doesn't really matter to me.

Here's just one of my old Hiroshiges, entitled Cherry Blossom Viewing at Asaka Hill, from the series Famous Places in Edo from 1832-1834.



PS: I believe it's CE, not ACE -- the usage isn't parallel to BCE.

 

@DonnaML, thank you very much for helping me out with CE dating. It made instant intuitive sense ...as soon as you pointed it out!
But, Just, Nooooooo, your Hiroshige is,
Just,
Thing, and
All That.
I'm floored, enough Not to ask you about whether you could consider parting with one. Nope, especially for this sort of medium, I Know they have a better home than I could give them.

 

@DonnaML I could never afford a whole incunabula, so I sometimes entertained the thought of getting a single page or a leaf from a manuscript. I resisted till now, but after seeing your excellent examples, I might just give in! That lovely woodblock of Freiburg brings fond memories as I visited that magnificent cathedral a few years back. And I think I mentioned it before, but I also collect Japanese prints, and I am an Utagawa Kuniyoshi fan-boy (especially the Samurai battle triptychs).

This thread is turning into a book lover's one, so let me post a couple more pics from some books in my collection that I have handy:

From an early 1700's massive bible with almost a hundred full-page illustrations:





From an old history book about England again from the early 1700s, very richly illustrated:






From the 'new' edition of the book of martyrs (again from the 1700s, many illustrations of torture in this one):





From a topographical book about Leeds form the same period:





I think that's enough for the time being... @Andrew McCabe , apologies, I think we kinda hijacked your thread!