Oct 14, 2021 - Sale 2582

Sale 2582 - Lot 125

Price Realized: $ 422
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 300 - $ 500
Illustrated Travel, Two 18th Century Imprints.

Including: Engelbert Kaempfer's (1651-1716) Amoenitatum Exoticarum Politico-Physico-Medicarum Fasciculi V [...] Rerum Persicarum & Ulterioris Asiae, Lemgo: Meyer, 1712, first edition, quarto, illustrated with thirteen of sixteen folding engravings, lacking text pages (457/458, text only, and 679/680, with an engraving) all missing material supplied in facsimile; with sixty-two of sixty-three full-page engravings, and numerous text illustrations; much of interest illustrated in the text, including dozens of botanical plates, scenes, and images of a hookah, Japanese furniture, musical instruments, acupuncture, a Japanese monk, and a chart of the body used for Asian medicine, many plates with the subjects identified in the local languages; bound in full modern brown buckram, contents toned, imprint cropped, 8 1/2 x 6 3/4 in.

[And] Georg Meister's Der Orientalisch-Indianische Kunst- und Lust-Gaertner, Dresden & Leipzig: Christoph Hekel, 1731, quarto illustrated with engraved frontispiece, portrait, and twelve plates (of which two are folding), and one text engraving, lacking four text leaves: O2, O3, Ii2, and Ii3; and perhaps one preliminary leaf after the portrait of the dedicatee; bound in paste-paper-covered boards, worn, boards and spine becoming detached, 7 3/4 x 6 in. (2)

Kaempfer's important work on Japan identifies close to 500 different native plant species for the first time. He visited Persia as secretary to the Swedish ambassador in 1648 and traveled to Japan in the early 1690s with the Dutch East India Company as their chief surgeon. Kaempfer stayed in the country for the better part of three years, travelling and studying natural history, geography, natural resources, art, music, and culture.

Hunt Botanical Library II, 427; Nissen Botanische Buch Illustration, pages 89-91; Bowers Western Medical Pioneers in Feudal Japan, pages 38-58; and Bowers, "Engelbert Kaempfer: Physician, Explorer, Scholar, and Author," Journal of the History of Medicine, vol. XXI, no 3.