Consortium offers 'Discovery of America' Catalogue at New York International Antiquarian Book Fair

The Discovery of America catalogue of works will be offered for sale at the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair 2024 by a consortium of four specialist dealers, London bookseller Peter Harrington, the New Haven-based William Reese Company, James Cummins Bookseller of New York, and Australia’s Horden House.  

Drawn from the rare book collection of R. David Parsons (1939-2014), this includes, in the words of Parsons himself, "the texts of seaborne discovery, exploration and settlement from the era of Columbus until that point in the first half of the 19th century when little remained to be discovered".

Many of these texts have not come to market in the last quarter century, when Parsons first began assembling his collection of rare books charting the earliest Spanish push that led to the discovery of the Americas in the West, and the earliest Portuguese voyages to the East. Also included in the collection are several pre-Columbian texts that prompted their exploratory and expansionist thinking. The Eastern Voyages from Parsons’s extensive collection are to be offered separately later this year.

Highlights include: 

    •    the first published eye-witness description of the North American mainland by Fr. Juan Diaz, one of only four known copies and the only one believed to be in private hands
    •    an extremely scarce early edition of Martin Waldseemüller’s Cosmographiae, the first book to name America in print
    •    an extraordinary copy in contemporary binding of the famed 1513 Ptolemy atlas, featuring the first printed map of America
    •    the earliest obtainable document relating to Hernan Cortés and the discovery of Mexico, published in a very rare German news sheet from 1520 - it precedes the 1521 account by Peter Martyr and the more widely available 1524 edition of Cortés’s second letter
    •    Vespucci’s Mundus Novus, the first published account of Brazil and the New World, and the first to describe it as such
    •    the first printed history of Mexico and the first work to name California in print, an exceedingly rare work by Francisco López de Gomára that includes the first Spanish map of the American continent, the first Spanish map of the west coast of America, and the first illustration of a buffalo
    •    the Pillone set of Ramusio, adorned with painted fore edges by a pupil of Titian, including the earliest printed account of Verrazzano's “discovery” of New York harbour
    •    the first and only edition of Bernardinus Carvajal’s pivotal 1494 oration which ignited a geopolitical contest for global dominance, one of the earliest printed documents to mention the discovery of the New World
    •    rare first edition of the first three Decades of New World by historian Peter Martyr, containing the first account of the sighting of the Pacific in 1513 by Balboa
    •    a 16th century manuscript epic poem on the life of Columbus, the earliest entirely original poem inspired by the contemporary sources on his life and discoveries (circa 1550)
    •    the first Latin edition of the first printed collection of voyages by Fracanzano da Montalboddo, considered after Columbus’s letter to be the most important contribution to the early history of American discovery
    •    the first complete edition of Peter Martyr’s Eight Decades and considered in some respects more correct than Hakluyt’s edition (Paris, 1587), which is usually considered the best.
    •    several of the earliest works on the “Columbian Exchange”, that is, works on the origins of syphilis, including a medical incunable by Joseph Grünpeck de Burckhausenn