Antiquarian Books Wanted / Bought: Science, Travel, History.

For a while now we've been building up a stock of antiquarian books, which we roughly class as books published prior to 1900. We focus primarily on books that are interesting and / or ground-breaking. This could be the publication of a classic novel or poem, a breakthrough feat in scientific understanding or an account of exotic travel. Below is an ever expanding list of authors, subjects and titles we're actively seeking. Though of course please do bring and rare or old books to our attention. Do let us know too if you have something that, while not ground-breaking is interesting or even just nice to look at. Books with ornate bindings, or exquisite plates and illustrations are always highly sought after. This could include anything from Edwardian children's books to the Orchids of Malaysia. If you have a book that transfixes you then there's a chance we'll be interested.

It's much trickier to outline exactly what we're looking for with antiquarian volumes but here's a rough list.

  1. We can often accept later / early editions of the books
  2. We can often accept non-English language editions
  3. Fine bindings are also of interest
  4. The list is not a complete list, but is just a few suggestions.
  5. We often buy collected works
  6. Titles have been translated to English below in general.


  • Adam Smith [The Wealth of Nations]
  • Aesop’s Fables [Various Editions]
  • Alexander Pope [An Essay on Criticism, Homer Translations, Works]
  • Alexander Pope [The Rape of the Lock]
  • Alexander Pushkin [Eugene Onegin, The Captain’s Daughter]
  • Alexandre Dumas [The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, Man in the Iron Mask]
  • Alfred Tennyson [Idylls of the King]
  • Ammianus Marcellinus [Later Roman Empire]
  • Ann Radcliffe [The Mysteries of Udolpho, A Romance of the Forest, The Italian]
  • Anonymous [Sir Gawain and the Green Knight]
  • Anonymous [Volsunga Saga]
  • Antoine Francois Prevost [Manon Lescaut]
  • Anton Chekov [Various, Works]
  • Aphra Behn [Various, Oroonoko]
  • Arthur Rimbaud [A Season in Hell]
  • Augustine of Hippo [Confessions, City of God, The Trinity, Life Of...]
  • Baldassare Castiglione [The Book of the Courtier]
  • Bartolome de las Casas [Desctruction of the Indies]
  • Baruch Spinoza [Ethics]
  • Ben Jonson [Volpone, Bartholomew Fair, Every Man In His Humour, Eastward Ho!, The Alchemist]
  • Benvenuto Cellini [Autobiography]
  • Blaise Pascal [Pensees]
  • Boethius [The Consolation of Philosophy]
  • Bram Stoker [Dracula]
  • Byron [Don Juan]
  • Carlo Collodi [Story of a Puppet / Pinocchio]
  • Carlo Goldoni [Four Comedies, The Servant of Two Masters]
  • Charles Baudelaire [Les Fleurs du Mal]
  • Charles Darwin [On the Origin of Species, The Descent of Man]
  • Charles Dickens [Fine Editions, and Editions in Original Parts]
  • Charles Perrault [Fairy Tales, Early Editions, Illustrated Editions]
  • Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte [Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights]
  • Christina Rossetti [Goblin Market]
  • Christopher Marlowe [Doctor Faustus, Edward II, Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta]
  • Daniel Defoe [Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, The Journal of the Plague Year, Roxana]
  • Dante Alighieri [The Divine Comedy]
  • David Hume [An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, A Treatise of Human Nature]
  • Denis Diderot [Jacques the Fatalist, The Nun]
  • Desiderius Erasmus [Praise of Folly]
  • Edgar Allen Poe [Works, Tales, Poems, Various Editions]
  • Edmund Burke [Reflections on the Revolution in France, Philosophical Enquiry]
  • Edmund Spenser [The Faerie Queen, Poems, Works]
  • Edward Gibbon [The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire]
  • Elizabeth Barrett Browning [Sonnets from the Portuguese]
  • Elizabeth Gaskell [North and South, Wives and Daughters]
  • Fanny Burney [Evelina, Camilla]
  • Francis Bacon [The New Atlantis, Works, Essays]
  • Francois de La Rochefoucauld [Maxims]
  • Francois Rabelais [Gargantua and Pantagruel]
  • Francois Villon [Poems]
  • Friedrich Nietzsche [Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil]
  • Fyodor Dostoyevsky [Crime and Punishment, Notes from the Underground, The Brothers Karamazov, etc., The Idiot]
  • Galileo Galilei [Early Editions]
  • Geoffrey Chaucer [The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde]
  • Geoffrey of Monmouth [The British History]
  • George Berkeley [Principles of Human Knowledge]
  • George Eliot [Middlemarch, Silas Marner]
  • George Herbert [The Temple]
  • Giacomo Leopardi [Poems]
  • Giorgio Vasari [The Lives of the Artists]
  • Goethe [The Sorrows of Young Werther, Faust]
  • Gottfried von Strassburg [Tristan and Isolde/Iseult]
  • Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz [Discourse on Metaphysics]
  • Gustave Flaubert [Madame Bovary]
  • Guy de Maupassant [Bel Ami]
  • Hans Christian Andersen [Fairy Tales, Early Editions, Illustrated Editions, The Little Mermaid]
  • Henrik Ibsen [A Doll’s House]
  • Henry David Thoreau [Walden]
  • Henry Fielding [Tom Jones, Works]
  • Henry James [The Turn of the Screw, The Portrait of a Lady]
  • Herman Melville [Moby Dick / The Whale]
  • Horace Walpole [The Castle of Otranto]
  • Ibn Battuta [Travels]
  • Immanuel Kant [Metaphysics of Morals, Critique of Pure Reason]
  • Isaac Newton [Principia]
  • Ivan Turgenev [Fathers and Sons]
  • Izaak Walton [The Compleat Angler]
  • J Sheridan Le Fanu [Through a Glass Darkly, Carmilla]
  • James Boswell [The Life of Samuel Johnson]
  • Jane Austen [Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, Emma, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park,  Northanger Abbey]
  • Jean de La Fontaine [Fables]
  • Jean Racine [Phedre, Andromaque]
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau [The Social Contract, Confessions, Emile]
  • Johann David Wyss [The Swiss Family Robinson]
  • John Bunyan [The Pilgrim’s Progress]
  • John Calvin [Institutes of the Christian Religion]
  • John Fletcher [The Custom of the Country, The Scornful Lady]
  • John Ford [‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore]
  • John Gay [The Beggar’s Opera]
  • John Keats [Poems etc.]
  • John Locke [Treatises of Government, Essay Concerning Human Understanding]
  • John Milton [Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Areopagitica, Samson Agonises]
  • John Polidori [The Vampyre]
  • John Stewart Mill [On Liberty]
  • John Webster [The Duchess of Malfi]
  • John Webster [The White Devil]
  • Jonathan Swift [Gulliver’s Travels, A Modest Proposal]
  • Jules Verne [UK First Editions]
  • Karl Marx [The Communist Manifesto]
  • Kate Chopin [The Awakening]
  • Knut Hamsun [Hunger]
  • Laurence Sterne [Tristram Shandy, A Sentimental Journey, Works]
  • Leo Tolstoy [War and Peace, Anna Karenina]
  • Lewis Carroll [Alice in Wonderland, Alice Underground etc.]
  • Louisa May Alcott [Little Women, Little Men]
  • Luis Vaz de Camoes [The Lusiads]
  • Mark Twain [Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer]
  • Mary Shelley [Frankenstein, The Last Man]
  • Mary Wollstonecraft [The Rights of Woman]
  • Matthew Gregory Lewis [The Monk]
  • Michel de Montaigne [Essays]
  • Miguel de Cervantes [Don Quixote]
  • Moderata Fonte [The Worth of Women, Floridoro]
  • Moliere [Tartuffe, The Misanthrope, Don Juan]
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne [The Scarlet Letter]
  • Niccolo Machiavelli [The Prince, Florentine History, Art of War, Mandragola etc.]
  • Nicolaus Copernicus [On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres]
  • Nikolai Gogol [Dead Souls, The Overcoat, Works]
  • Oliver Goldsmith [She Stoops to Conquer, The Vicar of Wakefield]
  • Oscar Wilde [The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Canterville Ghost]
  • Philip Sidney [Defence of Poesie]
  • Pierre Corneille [Horace, Cinna]
  • Pierre Corneille [Le Cid]
  • Ptolemy [Cosmography, Geographical Works]
  • R.D. Blackmoore [Laure Doone]
  • Rene Descartes [Discourse]
  • Robert Burton [Anatomy of Melancholy]
  • Robert Louis Stevenson [Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde]
  • Samuel Johnson [A Dictionary of the English Language, Rasselas, Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland..., Life of Richard Savage, Lives of the Poets]
  • Samuel Richardson [Clarissa, Pamela]
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge [The Rime of the Ancient Mariner]
  • Sendhal [The Red and the Black]
  • Soren Kierkegaard [A Fragment of Life]
  • Stephen Crane [Red Badge of Courage]
  • Strabo [Geography]
  • The Arabian Nights
  • Theodore Dreiser [Sister Carrie]
  • Thomas a Kempis [The Imitation of Christ]
  • Thomas Aquinas [Summa Theologica, Ethics of Aristotle]
  • Thomas Dekker [The Roaring Girl]
  • Thomas Hardy [Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Far From the Madding Crowd, Mayor of Casterbridge, Return of the Native]
  • Thomas Hobbes [Leviathan]
  • Thomas Kyd [The Spanish Tragedy]
  • Thomas Malory [Le Morte d'Arthur]
  • Thomas Mann [Buddenbrooks]
  • Thomas Middleton [The Changeling, The Country Spectator, The Revenger’s Tragedy, Works]
  • Thomas More [Utopia, Debellacyon]
  • Thomas Paine [The Age of Reason, Common Sense, Rights of Man]
  • Tobias Smollet [Humphrey Clinker, Roderick Random]
  • Torquato Tasso [Jerusalem Delivered, Aminta]
  • Victor Hugo [Les Miserables, Hunchback of Notre-Dame]
  • Voltaire [Candide, Micromegas, Zadig]
  • Walt Whitman [Leaves of Grass]
  • Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm [Fairy Tales, Early Editions, Illustrated Editions]
  • Wilkie Collins [The Woman in White, The Moonstone]
  • William Beckford [Vathek]
  • William Blake [Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell]
  • William Bland [Journey of Discovery to Port Philip]
  • William Congreve [The Way of the World]
  • William Rowley [The Witch of Edmonton]
  • William Shakespeare [Collected works, Early Editions]
  • William Wordsworth [Lyrical Ballads]
  • William Wycherley [The Country Wife]


We're based in Leeds, but will travel anywhere for the right books. You can contact us on 07557 652 609 or at info@hyraxia.com