A very good clean copy of the first edition of this most remarkable vernacular work on military machines and defence architecture, illustrated with 90 handsome copperplates by the author himself, here in strong and fine impression. ‘The first book printed at Chaumont’ (Cockle). Joseph Boillot (1546-1605), a French artist, architect and military engineer, was the officer in charge of gunpowder and saltpetre in his native Langres. His most important work, ‘Modelles artifices’ includes both those that had by then become common weapons of artillery as well as some of his own invention. It begins by highlighting the importance of the human senses when at war. There follow illustrated accounts of the use of military machinery, from levers (with an interesting engraving illustrating Archimedes’s statement ‘If you give me a lever and a place to stand, I can move the world’), to augers, instruments to calculate distances and triangulation, sundry kinds of modular ladders, improvised bridges, reinforced gates (‘against the monsters who are the rage of today’s France’), gunpowder, sulphur, cannons, the structure of carts and horse harness strong enough to carry or draw heavy machinery, tools for the cleaning of cannons and adjusting the aim. The last 60 ll. consist of descriptions of extraordinady pyrotechnical artifices, all handsomely illustrated at work. Most handsome is the engraving of the German alchemist Berthold Schwarz (fl. C14), the legendary inventor of gunpowder, being counselled by the Devil, surrounded by alchemical instruments and a finely bound book. A scarce, most interesting and exquisitely printed work.
