The land of Ethiopia had long fascinated Europeans, not merely as an exotic and foreign land full of strange beasts, as evidenced by the incredibly ferocious looking hippo portrayed in this volume (first image below), but also as an ancient and independent Christian empire beyond the realms of Islam which hemmed them in.

As the subtitle of this volume, 'The antiquities of ancient Britain, derived from the Phoenicians', indicates, Aylett Sammes attempted to accommodate British antiquity with classical and biblical histories by postulating a pedigree for the ancient Britons from a civilization mentioned in those accounts.

This detail comes from the first printed Armenian Bible: "The editio princeps of the Armenian Bible ... In the 17th century Armenian manuscript Bibles had become so scarce and costly that the Patriarch Jacobus Caractri about 1662 despatched an ecclesiastic named Uscan (or Osgan) to Europe to arrange for the printing of an edition of the Armenian Scriptures.

Printing reached the English colonies in New England in 1638, when a press was set up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by Joseph Glover. In 1685 Samuel Green, who printed this volume, was apparently the only printer operating in Cambridge, although presses had been established in Boston and Philadelphia.

An engraving of Satan tormenting the damned in Hell from the fourth edition of Milton's epic. This was the first illustrated edition of the text, produced twenty years after the first edition and fourteen years after Milton's death. It was also the first edition with which Jacob Tonson was associated.

Originally from Gdansk, David Loggan (1635-1700?) moved to England in the middle of the 17th century and became engraver to Oxford University, and subsequently to Cambridge University. He produced two volumes of architectural engravings, showing views of the colleges of the Universities, Oxonia illustrata and Cantabrigia illustrata.

When reviewing his copy of Diophantus in 1637, Pierre de Fermat wrote his famous 'Last Theorem' in the margin, together with a note to the effect that he had discovered a proof that was too lengthy to fit in the margin. When his son Samuel published this edition of Diophantus he incorporated all of his father’s marginal notes in the text.

Hooke (1635-1702) made many contributions to 17th century science but Micrographia was his masterpiece. Although not the first publication of microscopical observations, it was the first great work devoted to them, and its impact rivaled that of Galileo's Sidereus nuncius half a century earlier.

In this posthumous publication an argument put forward by Inigo Jones was reconstructed from notes he had made when surveying the monument at the personal request of James I.

The poet Edward Benlowes often lavished gifts of books on his protégés and on his old college. This volume is Benlowes's own copy of his major poetical work, Theophila, which describes the soul's longing for and eventual union with God.