Auserlesne Schnecken, Muscheln und andere Schaalthiere... Choix de Coquillages et de Crustaces. Copenhagen: 1758. Folio (617 x 450 mm). 12 engraved plates colored by a contemporary hand. Titles printed in German and French, large mezzotint head- and tail-piece printed in sanguine, 12 engraved plates of shells colored by a contemporary hand, without allegorical frontispiece portrait showing the bust of King Frederick V (as often). Contemporary Danish marbled calf, roll-tooled floral border with cornerpieces, royal Danish arms on sides. A few leaves a little browned, rebacked with old spine laid down, spine dried with chipping in a few places.

FIRST EDITION OF REGENFUSS' SPECTACULAR CONCHOLOGICAL ILLUSTRATIONS delicately colored mostly by his wife Margaretha Helena, and by G. Mueller and Johann M. Leyh. "Through the mediation of the Dane, Count A.G. Moltke, and the King of Denmark and Norway, Frederic V (1723-1766), Regenfuss went to Copenhagen where he was appointed engraver to the King... [His conchology] was an immediate success, principally... for the superb quality of its plates and, perhaps, for the size of the book itself which has a larger surface area per page than any conchological work published before or since" (Dance). Regenfuss, the illustrator of the work and not the author of the text, was the driving force behind the book's publication. The text was written by Lorenz Spengler (1720-1807), Johann Andreas Cramer (1710-1777) and Peter Ascanius (1723-1803) who based their text on Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein's (1723-1795) original text. This is the second issue. The first issue, with the same plates but shorter text, was published in the same year and withdrawn by order of the King. Brunet IV:1180; See Dance Shell Collecting p 38; van Benthem Jutting "On the Conchological Work of F.M. Regenfuss" Leiden, 1964; Nissen ZBI 3338.