THE PARSONS COLLECTION THE AGE OF EXPLORATION
Peter Harrington london IN ASSOCIATION WITH William Reese Company
author, subject, and provenance index
Abacus Manuscript 35
Albertini, Francesco 66
Alfonsine tables 16, 21
Alvares, Francisco 1, 2
Anghiera, Pietro Martire d’ 3, 4, 20
Arbor, Edward 20
Arcolano, Giovanni 48
Astronomy 16, 21, 68, 69
Audsley, George and William 26
Avezac, Armand d’ 74
Baptista, Mantuanus 25
Barbaro, Ermolao 51
Beggi, Francesco Orazio 17
Behaim, Martin 62
Benzoni, Girolamo 5
Cabot, Sebastian 3, 4, 20
Camden, Lord 43
Camus, Armand-Gaston 6
Castilho, Antonio de 7
Colón, Hernán (Fernando Columbus) 15
Columbus, Christopher 3, 4, 8–15, 25
Cordoba, Alfonso de 16
Corte Real, Jerónimo 17
Cortés, Hernán 3, 4, 18, 37
Courte de La Blanchardière, René 19
Dalrymple, Alexander 2
De Bry, Theodor 6
De Nobili family of Acquasparta 27
Dictionaries and Encyclopaedias 28, 47, 64, 70
Domenichi, Lodovico 30
Du Bocage, Anne-Marie 10, 11
Ecclesiastical Pensions 29
Eden, Richard 20
Egypt 3, 4
Erasmus, Desiderius 25
Ethiopia 1, 2, 4, 32
Faber, Johann 22
Faber, Wenzel 21
Fauno, Lucio 67
Ferdinando, Prince of Savoy 65
Fernández de Córdoba, Gonzalo 30
Ferri, Alfonso 23
Ficino, Marsilio 25
FitzGerald, Edward 26
Fra Mauro 78
Fracastoro, Girolamo 27
Fregoso, Battista 28
Gambara, Lorenzo 8
Gatinaria, Marco 48
Geography 50, 51
Gerard of Cremona 68
Giganti, Girolamo 29
Giovio Paolo 30
Giraldi, Lilio Gregorio 31 Goa 7
Góis, Damião de 4, 17, 32, 33
Gottschalk, Paul 34
Grabhorn Press 73
Grolier Club 12, 26, 75
Guaiacum 23, 27
Hariot, Thomas 13
Heber, Richard 2
Hudson, John Elbridge 50
Hunter, William Francis, of Barjang 45 Incunabula 21, 25, 36, 56, 63, 65, 70 India 7, 17
Johannes de Strasburg 35 Jones, Owen 26
Juel-Jensen, Bent 2, 32, 33 Lapland 32
Lewis, Oscar 73
López de Gomára, Francisco 37 Macrobius 38 Magellan 59
Mandeville, Sir John 39-46 Manuscripts 58
Mapmaking 54, 55, 62, 71
Matal, Jean (Metellus) 57 Medicine 23, 25, 48
Medina, Pedro de 49
Mela, Pomponius 50, 51 Mexico 1, 18, 37, 52, 72
Mocenigo, Andrea 53
Münster, Sebastian 20, 54, 55 Navigation 31, 49
Olschki, Leo S. 56
Omar Khayyám 26
Osório, Jerónimo 57
Ottato, Cesare 48
Padilla, Thomas 2
Parker, Matthew 58
Parreño, Alberto 12
Penrose, Boise 59 Peru 19, 76, 77
Peter Martyr: see Anghiera Peuerbach, Georg von 69 Pius II, Pope (Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini) 14
Pollack von Parnau, Franz 30 Polo, Marco 60
Portugal 57
Prester John 32, 36
Purchas, Samuel 61
Quaritch, Bernard, published 13, 52
Quiros, Pedro Fernandez de 61
Rabanus Maurus 25
Ratdolt, Erhard 63
Ravenstein, Ernst Georg 62
Redgrave, Gilbert Richard 63
Reisch, Gregor 64
Rhazes (Abu Bakr al-Razi) 48
Riccio, Michele 31
Rome Guidebooks 65-67
Russia 22
Sacrobosco, Johannes de 68, 69 Schedel, Hartmann 70
Selves, Miguel de 2
Smyth, William Henry 5
Spotorno, Giovanni Battista 12 Starr, Frederick 52
Stella, Tilemann 71
Stigliani, Tommaso 9
Stuart, Charles, Baron Stuart de Rothesay 17
Syphilis 8, 23, 24, 27, 48
Teive, Diogo de 33
Thévenot, Melchisedech 6
Varthema, Ludovico di 72
Vespucci, Amerigo 3, 4, 13, 66, 73, 74
Waldseemüller, Martin 74
Walters, Henry 56
War of the League of Cambrai 53
Warren, Arthur 75
Whittingham, Charles 75
Xerez, Francisco de 76 Zarate, Augustin 77
Zumárraga, Juan de 1
Zurla, Placido 78
THE AGE OF EXPLORATION
EXPANDED WITH AN EARLY ACCOUNT OF MEXICO
ÁLVARES, Francisco; and Juan de Zumárraga. Bottschafft des grossmechtigsten Konigs David aus dem grossen und hohen Morenland, den man gemeinlich nennet Priester Johann. Dresden: durch Wolffgang Stöckel, 1533
Small quarto (194 × 151 mm): a–f 4; 24 leaves, unnumbered. Disbound. Housed in a custom brown cloth solander box and chemise. A few minor contemporary side notes and underlinings. A little glue and small paper residues on spine from previous binding, contents uniformly browned, a couple of small marginal ink smudges and rust spots, small intermittent light damp stains to margins, more prominent near gutter in last gathering. A very good, well-preserved copy.
First German edition of this important early account of Ethiopia, translated from the original Latin edition of the same year and supplemented with a letter by Juan de Zumárraga, the first bishop of New Spain, on the progress of his mission in Mexico. “This letter was not present in the Latin edition, so the work only here becomes an Americanum” (Kraus).
Zumárraga (1468–1548) opens his letter with the announcement that he and his fellow Franciscans have baptized 250,000 natives, destroyed more than fifty temples of their gods, broken and burned more than 20,000 figures of demons, and brought an end to human sacrifices. Zumárraga praises the progress of the Aztec youth in their education and their adherence to Christian teaching, particularly in reading, writing, and singing, noting their special devotion to the Virgin Mary. He describes the Franciscan compounds at length, notes that he has been performing marriages, and informs his superiors that of the many missionaries who speak Nahuatl, there is one man, Petrus de Gante, who is particularly skilled. This is the famous Peter of Ghent (Peeter Van Der Moere, ca. 1486–1572), the former confessor to Emperor Charles V, who founded the first schools in New Spain, first at Texcoco and then at Tenochtitlan. The letter concludes with a report that the empress has sent six women from Spain to educate Aztec girls and women. The text was translated into German from the first Latin edition published the year before.
The first part of the book contains a series of letters from Emperor Lebna Dengel to the Portuguese kings Manuel I and João III and to Pope Clement VII. The letters were delivered by the Portuguese missionary and explorer Francisco Álvares (1465–1540) upon his return from a diplomatic mission to Ethiopia, which lasted six years from 1520. In the text, Lebna Dengel declares loyalty to the Christian faith and asks for military help against the invasion of the Ottomans. Preceding Alvares’s Verdadeira informação (1540), these letters constitute the earliest record of his embassy to the Ethiopian court.
Two variants of this edition are known, one with and one without the date on the title page, without established priority. The present copy matches VD16 ZV8721 and has the undated title page.
VD16 ZV8721. H.P. Kraus, Americana Vetustissima. Fifty Books, Manuscripts, & Maps Relating to America from the First Fifty Years After Its Discovery (1493–1542): in Celebration of the Columbus Quincentenary, 1990, no. 39.
[171489]
£20,000
WITH A PREFACE BY ÁLVARES NOT FOUND IN THE PORTUGUESE EDITION
2. ÁLVARES, Francisco. Historia de las Cosas de Ethiopia en la qual se cuenta muy copiosamente el estado y potencia del Emperador della, (que es el que muchos han pensado ser el preste Ioan) con otras infinitas particularidades assi de la religion de aquella gente, como de sus cerimonias … traduzida por Miguel de Selves. Toledo: Pedro Rodriguez, 1588
Octavo (140 × 92 mm): ¶8 †8 A–Z8 Aa–Yy8 Zz4; 380 leaves, ff. [16], 362, [2]. Eighteenth-century vellum, spine with raised bands, traces of gilt decoration in compartments, red morocco label, covers ruled in blind, edges sprinkled blue and red. Woodcut printer’s device on recto of last leaf. Nineteenth-century bibliographical annotations on verso of front free endpaper. Some soiling to binding, foot of spine and front cover sometime repaired, front joint and inner hinge cracked, but firm, faintly damp-stained and cockled throughout, paper repairs to front pastedown and free endpaper, small worm trail in lower margin of gatherings A-E touching a few letters, portion of Gg3 torn affecting a couple of words at end of 7 lines and catchword, else clean. A very good copy.
Third Spanish edition of Álvares’s influential description of Ethiopia, a narrative of his diplomatic mission of 1520–26. Originally published in 1540 in Portuguese, it is the earliest extensive printed account of the country and a fundamental source of information on sixteenth-century Ethiopian history, geography, and social life.
The Spanish translation, first published in 1557, is by Thomas Padilla (although the title page bears the name of Miguel de Selves). It features a preface by Álvares not included in the original Portuguese edition.
Álvares spent six years in the country travelling through differ ent provinces, including Hamasen, Säraye, and Tigray (where he visited the ancient city of Aksum), eventually reaching the court of Lebna Dengel. “The scope of the work . . . goes beyond Christian Ethiopia to include valuable insights into neighbouring Muslim kingdoms. In ch. 113, Álvares describes the fighting that broke out between Ethiopia and the sultanate of Adal, and the death in battle of its ruler, Mahfuz ibn Mu hammad (Mafudi) in July 1517 . . . Together with the works of the Jesuit missionaries, Álvares’ narrative continues to be the most widely used among the historical sources for the Horn of Africa” (Thomas et al., p. 787).
Provenance: From the library of the Scottish geographer Alexander Dalrymple (1737–1808), then purchased by the great bibliophile Richard Heber (1773–1833) in Dalrymple’s 1809 sale, with Heber’s manuscript purchase note at the head of front pastedown and what might be Dalrymple’s manuscript shelf-mark on the front pastedown. This copy was subsequently sold as lot 42 in volume V of Heber’s 1835 sale and was later in the library of Dr Bent Juel-Jensen (1922–2006), a Danish bibliophile, collector, and medical officer to the University of Oxford, with his Ethiopian bookplate on the front pastedown.
Fumagalli 609. David Thomas, John Chesworth, John Azumah, Stanisław GrodŹ, Andrew Newman, Douglas Pratt, eds., Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History, vol. 7, 2009.
[171611] £3,000
IMPORTANT COLLECTED EDITION OF MARTYR, FOCUSING ON AMERICA
3. ANGHIERA, Pietro Martire d’ (Peter Martyr): De rebus oceanicis & orbe novo decades tres … Eiusdem praeterea Legationis Babylonicae libri tres. Basel: Joannes Bebelius, 1533
Quarto (285 × 193 mm): [alpha-beta]6 a-o6 p8; 104 leaves, ff. [12], 92. Early limp vellum, faint manuscript title on spine. In a cloth chemise and morocco-backed slipcase, spine gilt. Woodcut printer’s device on title and verso of last leaf, woodcut initials. Two light ink stamps of Sir Walter John Trevelyan on front board, another on front fly leaf, small institutional stamp of Biblioteca Magnani, Bologna, on titlepage, shelfmark on inside front cover. Spine worn at bands, boards stripped in three places, faint damp stain to upper portion through second half of text, else internally fine.
A later edition, containing his first three Decades, first published in 1516, supplemented by an abridgement of the fourth Decade.
Peter Martyr of Anghiera (c. 1457–1525), a native of Italy, served the Spanish court in numerous capacities: soldier, priest, courtier, chaplain, teacher, historian, and ambassador. “In 1520 he became secretary to the Council of the Indies and later was appointed by emperor Charles V as the first official chronicler of the Indies. Although Martyr never set foot in the New World, he used his privileged position as a courtier to gather a great wealth of information from documents and through personal interviews. Following the model of the Latin historian Titus Livius, the Decades are volumes written in Latin divided into ten books each. They cover all aspects of the New World - the geography, the natural world . . . the natives, and all major events after the discovery” (Delgado-Gomez).
Based on firsthand information the author was able to access through his position on the Council of the Indies, the Decades include accounts of the discoveries of Columbus, Vespucci, Cabot, and Cortés. In addition, there is information concerning the conquest of Mexico and details regarding Spanish settlements in the New World including Florida, Cuba, Hispaniola, and the Caribbean. Included in this edition, as in the 1516 printing, is Martyr’s account of his embassy to Egypt in 1501 on behalf of King Ferdinand.
Bell A213; Church 65; European Americana 533/1; Harrisse BAV 176; JCB German Americana 533/1; JCB (3)I:108; Maggs, Bibliotheca Americana, 4923; Medina (BHA) 92; Sabin 1557. Angel Delgado-Gomez, Spanish Historical Writing about the New World, 1493–1700, 1992.
[171501]
£12,000
MARTYR’S DECADES, WITH OTHER SIGNIFICANT TRAVEL ACCOUNTS
4. ANGHIERA, Pietro Martire d’ (Peter Martyr). De rebus oceanicis et novo orbe, decades tres. Item eiusdem, de Babylonica legatione libri III. Et item de rebus Aethiopicis, Indicis, Lusitanicis & Hispanicis, opuscula quaedam historica doctissima, quae hodie non facile alibi reperiuntur, Damiani a Goes Equitis Lusitani . . . Cum duplici locupletissimo indice. Cologne: Gervinum Calenium & haeredes Quentelios, 1574
Small octavo (162 × 100 mm): a–c8 A–2V8; 367 (of 368) leaves, lacking final blank 2V8, pp. [48], 655, [31]. Later half calf and decorated paper boards, spine gilt with raised bands, gilt leather label gilt, edges sprinkled. Woodcut initials. Occasional manuscript annotations and underlining, including to verso of front free endpaper, slightly later ownership inscription on front pastedown; modern bookplate to front pastedown. Text lightly tanned, very good.
A later edition of Martyr’s first three Decades, originally published in 1516, together with three other important works: his accounts of the Cortés expedition in Mexico, his account of his own diplomatic mission to Egypt, and Damião de Góis’s work on Ethiopia.
Martyr’s first three Decades (there were eight in all) include accounts of Columbus’s voyages, the first printed account of the expedition of Sebastian Cabot to North America, and the first account of the 1513 sighting of the Pacific Ocean by Vasco Nunez de Balboa. To these are added Martyr’s 1521 Basel letter, De Insulis Nuper Inventis, describing Cortés’ initial landing and forays into Mexico; the three books of his De Babylonic Legatione, describing his diplomatic mission to Egypt in 1501 and 1502; and the writings of Damião de Góis, including those on Lapland and Ethiopia, originally published in 1544.
Provenance: Jesuit ownership inscription on title page “Colleg. Soc. Jesu dom. cat. inscriptus 1605”.
Adams M755; Bell A214; Bha 235; Borba De Moraes, p. 532; European Americana 574/; Howgego M65; Jcb (3)I:253; Hough 2; Palau 12595; Sabin 1558. Angel Delgado-Gomez, Spanish Historical Writing about the New World, 1493–1700, 1992.
[171486] £6,000
FIRST ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF AN IMPORTANT NEW WORLD ACCOUNT
5. BENZONI, Girolamo. History of the New World. Shewing His Travels in America, from A.D. 1541 to 1556: with Some Particulars of the Island of Canary. London: Hakluyt Society, 1857
Quarto (213 × 137 mm). Contemporary polished half calf, spine gilt with raised bands, gilt leather label, marbled boards. Oval portrait of author on title page and 18 illustrations in text. Armorial bookplate and modern bookplate to front pastedown. Boards lightly rubbed and soiled, occasional light foxing to contents, otherwise clean internally. A very good copy.
First complete English translation of Benzoni’s important early account of the New World. First published in Venice in 1565, Benzoni’s history was the first significant work on the Americas based on firsthand observations by a non-Spaniard, and was one of the most widely disseminated texts of its day.
Born in Milan, Benzoni spent fourteen years travelling through the Americas, be-
ginning in 1541. He was familiar with the Antilles, Guatemala, and the west coast of South America, and provides descriptions of these regions, as well as a history of the New World from the arrival of Columbus to the conquest of Peru. His history is also notable for containing an early account of the use of tobacco. Engaged in commerce, Benzoni quickly developed an intense enmity for the Spanish and their administration, and he treats them quite unfavorably in his text. He denounces the Spanish for their treatment of the Indians (in contrast, a good portion of the text describes Indian life before it became corrupted by European contact), and the author is also critical of the Spanish for their importation of slaves to America.
The wide distribution of his history made Benzoni the single most influential figure in describing the New World to Europe in the mid-sixteenth century. His work went through many printings, although Arents notes that “it appears never to have been permitted to circulate in Spain.” Perhaps the most influential version of the text appeared as parts IV-VI of De Bry’s Grand Voyages, where its anti-Spanish slant helped cement the “Black Legend” of Spanish depravity in the New World.
This Hakluyt Society edition was the first to offer an English translation of Benzoni’s history in its entirety. As the translator, William Henry Smyth, notes in his introduction, the only other English translation available to date had been that of Samuel Purchas, who, in volume IV of Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625), “gives little more than six pages” of extracts from Benzoni’s text. Smyth’s edition is translated from the Italian text of the second edition, published in Venice in 1572, and includes facsimiles of the original woodcut illustrations. Contents also include the Society’s four-page annual report for the year 1857, its tenth anniversary.
Arents 10 (Ref); Howgego B71; Palau 27650; Sabin 4805.
[171649] £400
6. CAMUS, Armand-Gaston. Mémoire sur la collection des Grands et Petits Voyages et sur la collection des voyages de Melchisedech Thevenot. Paris: Baudouin, Imprimeur de l’Institut National, 1802
Quarto (270 × 210 mm), pp. [4], iv, 401 [= 405, pp. 301–4 repeated], [2], [1] (blank). Untrimmed in contemporary pulled paste paper boards, skilfully rebacked to style, original printed spine label laid down. Boards a little rubbed, two leaves (pp. 27–30) loosely inserted, having escaped stitching, but an excellent copy, generally clean save a few minor blemishes, fresh, and unpressed.
First edition of this important early bibliographical study of new world exploration and one of the foremost examinations of the De Bry and Thévenot collections of travel narratives, among the most bibliographically complex works in the Americana canon. Armond Gaston Camus (1740–1804) was a noted French jurist and participant in the French Revolution.
“An excellent analysis, not only of De Bry’s, but of Thevenot’s collections, with incidental notes on those of Hervagius, Ramusio, Hakluyt and Hulsius” (Harrisse). Harrisse BAV, pp. xxiii-iv; LeClerc 99; Sabin 10328. [171635]
£1,600
CASTILHO, Antonio de. Commentario do cerco de Goa e Chaul, no anno de MDLXX, Viso-Rey Dom Luiz de Ataíde. Lisbon: Joaquiniana da Musica, 1736
Small quarto (201 × 143 mm): A-D4; 16 leaves, pp. 32. Contemporary limp vellum, spine lettered by hand. Woodcut title device and headpiece. Paper lightly damp-stained and toned, still a good copy.
Second edition, originally published in 1573, of this scarce account of the famous sieges of Goa and Chaul, two of the most important possessions of the Portuguese State of India. Antonio de Castilho was Knight of the Order of Aviz, and chief librarian of the Royal Archives of the Torre
In December 1570, a large army commanded personally by Ali Adil Shah of Bijapur, who had formed an alliance with other Indian princes to drive the Portuguese out of Asia, began the siege of Goa. However, the viceroy of India, Dom Luís de Ataíde, managed to keep naval supply lines open, while the forces of Bijapur proved unable to overcome Portuguese defences. Once the monsoon was over, Portuguese naval squadrons conducted amphibious operations against the coasts of Bijapur, and a peace was signed on 13 Decem-
The spur for this republication was likely the Luso–Maratha War, when armed conflict again flared up in the region, this time between the Portuguese and the Mahratta Confederacy, which invaded and raided Portugal-controlled villages near Diu, peace being established by the Treaty of Bombay in 1732. [171617]
AMERICA DISCOVERED IN POETRY
£1,600
8. (COLUMBUS, Christopher.) GAMBARA, Lorenzo. De navigatione Christophori Columbi. Libri quatuor. Editio copiosior. Rome: 1585
Small octavo (158 × 101 mm): A-G8 H4; 60 leaves, pp. 117, [3]. Eighteenth-century vellum over boards, spine with raised bands lettered in manuscript, marbled pastedowns, edges blue. Title page within elaborate engraved architectural border incorporating arms of Cardinal Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle and small drawing of a ship. Woodcut floriated initials, head- and tailpieces. Upper inner margin of title page detached from gutter, page remaining firm, outer margins discreetly repaired and reinforced on verso, first two gatherings faintly browned, occasional light foxing or minor mark, but generally clean. A very good copy.
Rare third edition, revised and with a much improved frontispiece, of the earliest printed full-scale poem on Columbus’s voyages. First published in 1581, it is the only extant poem that deals with all the four voyages and the only one in which Columbus features as the narrator-character, recounting his adventures in the first person.
All three editions (1581, 1583, 1585) are rare on the market; the last appearance of the first edition in commerce was over 75 years ago. Other than this copy, no others of this edition are traced in auction records. The last separate edition of
the poem, it features an attractive engraved frontispiece in place of the simple typographical title of its predecessors. The textual revisions are mainly concerned with style and language.
This is also the first Neo-Latin poem entirely dedicated to the discovery of America. The poem is divided into four books, each dealing with one of the voyages. In the postscript, Gambara acknowledges his sources, which include Peter Martyr’s Decades de orbe novo and Columbus’s biography written by his son Fernando. The banquet frame, the didactic tone of the work, and the epic style and language are inspired by Virgil’s Aeneid and Georgics, as well as other Latin poets such as Ovid and Propertius.
Gambara’s Columbus “is strongly rooted in the Medieval theological and scientific traditions . . . but he is also a representative of his own time, of the Age of Discoveries and of Renaissance science and scholarship . . . By blending and amalgamating these different literary and historical traditions, Gambara succeeded not only in writing the first Neo-Latin epic poem on Columbus and his discoveries during his four voyages, but also in setting a standard for future Columbian epic that has never been attained since” (Hofmann, p. 454).
The only Latin antecedent to this work was a short incidental passage in Fracastoro’s poem Syphilis (1530), which is referenced by Gambara at the end of this book. In vernacular, only two earlier works are known, both in Italian. The first is Giuliano Dati’s adaptation into Italian stanzas of Columbus’s famous letter on the first voyage, published in 1493 and based on the Latin translation of Leandro da Cosco. Dati’s poem, however, is the work of a translator, with little critical input of his own. The second work is a manuscript, dated to c.1550 and published only in a modern edition by Stelio Cro in 2010. Covering only the first voyage and part of the second, it appears to be a fragment.
A prolific poet, Gambara (1506) worked in Rome at the court of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese and Pope Gregory XIII and had contacts with many of the most famous writers of his time. De navigatione – Gambara’s most important achievement - was commissioned to him by Perrenot over forty years before it was eventually published. The work was also later included in Gambara’s Poemata omnia in 1586.
EDIT16 CNCE 20331; European Americana 585/32; ; JCB Italians 42; Sabin 26502. Heinz Hofmann, “Adveniat tandem Typhis qui detegat orbes. Columbus in Neo-Latin Epic Poetry (fifteenth–eighteenth Centuries)”, in Wolfgang Haase and Meyer Reinhold, eds, The Classical Tradition and the Americas, vol. I.1, 1994.
[171627] so £2,800
COLUMBUS’S VOYAGE BETWEEN HISTORY AND MYTH
(COLUMBUS, Christopher.) STIGLIANI, Tommaso. Del mondo nuovo venti primi canti. Co i sommarii dell’istesso autore dietro a ciaschedun d’essi, e con una lettera del medesimo in fine, la qual discorre sopra d’alcuni ricevuti avvertimenti intorno a tutta l’opera. Piacenza: Alessandro Bazacchi, 1617
Duodecimo (150 × 80 mm): A–2F12 2G6; 353 leaves, pp. 700, [6]. Contemporary vellum, manuscript title on bottom edge. Engraved map of the Americas on title page, woodcut initials, head- and tailpieces. Occasional minor early marginalia and underlinings. Vellum soiled with a few worm holes, spots of wear at extremities, ties missing, front inner hinge split, front cover still firmly attached at front joint ends, paper repairs to margins of title page and final gathering, worm trails near gutter of leaves N-R2 and X8Z7 occasionally touching or affecting text (especially on leaves N2-O3 and Y-Z5), gathering G browned, occasional spot of foxing, light damp stain, or mark. Despite its flaws, a good copy.
First edition of one of the most famous early epic poems on Columbus’s conquest of the Americas. The Italian Baroque poet Stigliani intertwines the historical events with mythological details inspired by the voyages of Dante, Aeneas, and St. John.
The story begins with an angel appearing to Columbus and revealing to him his mission to discover a new world. The plot then follows the navigator’s voyage and his fight against various enemies, including the evil wizard Licofronte, who tries to prevent him from bringing Christianity to the Americas. The poem is divided into 20 canti; in the seventh canto, Stigliani gives a geographical description of the New World, including “America in its shape resembles a large falcon with spread wings” (p. 161). The title page features a charming engraved vignette map of the western hemisphere, naming Mexico, Peru, Brazil, and “the unknown land” Antarctica.
Stigliani’s poem belongs to a tradition of poetry on Columbus and the Americas which started in the previous century with Lorenzo Gambara’s De navigatione Christophori Columbi (1581), Giovanni Giorgini’s Il mondo nuovo (1596), and other works. By painting Columbus as a heroic figure, elected by God, and a successor to Dante, Aeneas, and St. John, “Stigliani continues the literary projects of Virgil and Dante in asserting Roman (i.e. Roman Catholic) dominion over the known world and ought also, therefore, to be read also in light of the Counter-Reformation and the concomitant growth of the Jesuit and other missionary orders” (Watt, p. 11).
Educated in Naples, where he met the poets Giambattista Marino and Torquato Tasso, Stigliani (1573–1651) then moved to Rome, Torino, and eventually to Parma. There, he became secretary to Duke Ranuccio I Farnese, to whom this work is dedicated. A second revised and expanded edition was published in 1628.
JCB Italians 45; Sabin 91728; USTC 4028577. Mary Alexandra Watt, Dante, Columbus and the Prophetic Tradition: Spiritual Imperialism in the Italian Imagination, 2017.
[171563] £2,400
AN EPIC POEM ON COLUMBUS’S NEW WORLD ENCOUNTER, WITH PLATES
10. (COLUMBUS, Christopher.) DU BOCAGE, Anne-Marie. La Colombiade, ou la foi portée au nouveau monde. Poëme. Paris: Desaint & Saillant; Durand, 1756
Octavo (195 × 120 mm), pp. viii, 184, [2]. Contemporary mottled calf, rebacked, with original gilt spine laid down, raised bands, gilt label, board edges rules in gilt. Frontispiece, portrait, and 10 plates, engraved title vignette, headpieces to dedication leaf and beginning of first canto, tailpieces to end of each canto. Bookplate on front pastedown; ink inscription to verso of titlepage. Binding lightly rubbed, edges of textblock stained red, light, occasional foxing and soiling to text. A very good copy.
The first edition of this “epic poem on the discovery of America” (Sabin) featuring many beautifully-executed plates. Madame du Bocage (variously Boccage, 1710–1802) ran a distinguished salon in Paris, frequented by Voltaire, Fontenelle, and other luminaries. Together with her husband, Pierre-Joseph Fiquet du Bocage, she had a passionate interest in literature, and published several interesting works, including imitations of Milton and Pope. La Colombiade is her greatest contribution, a poised revisiting of the moment of contact between Columbus and indigenous Americans.
“La Colombiade . . . picks up the adventures of Columbus as he meets the leader of an Indian nation who asks who he is and why he is there . . . Columbus replies in astonishing detail, telling his auditor of ‘the three continents which form the universe,’ of the Supreme Being, of European manners and inventions, of his project, of Queen Isabella, of scurvy, of strange ‘phenomena’ of the sea, and of unrest among the sailors. ‘Merveilleux Etranger,’ exclaims the chief, no doubt overwhelmed by the barrage of heroic couplets. After many adventures a prayerful Columbus is visited by a tutelary angel who reveals the vast consequences of his enterprise” (Martin, p. 25).
The work contains ten plates by Pierre Quentin Chedel, with scenes depicting Columbus’s landing in the New World, his introduction to the American court, and a vivid shipwreck. Also included is a frontispiece portrait of the author engraved by Jacques Nicolas Tardieu after a painting by Marianne Loir. A second edition was published in 1758 but included only eight plates.
An attractive copy, in contemporary binding, of this epic French-language poem on Columbus’s New World encounter.
Cohen-De Ricci 328; JCB (1)3:1112; Library of Benjamin Franklin 910; Palau 76317; Quérard II:598; Sabin 21007. Terence Martin, “American Literature Discovers Columbus” in Christopher K. Lohmann, ed., Discovering Difference: Contemporary Essays in American Culture, 1993.
[171624]
11. (COLUMBUS, Christopher.) DU BOCAGE, Anne-Marie. La Colombiade, ou la foi portée au nouveau monde. Poëme. Paris: Desaint & Saillant; Durand, 1761
Octavo (197 × 120 mm), pp. viii, 184. nineteenth century quarter calf and embossed cloth boards, spine gilt. Frontispiece, portrait, and 10 plates, engraved title page vignette, headpieces to dedication leaf and beginning of first canto, tailpiece to end of introduction. Bookplate on front pastedown. Foot of front joint starting, boards rubbed and shelfworn, contents lightly tanned with some light, occasional foxing and soiling, damp stain to inner margin of final seven leaves of text, old stab holes to inner margin, small hole with loss to page numbers on leaf F5. A very good copy.
Second edition, from the first of 1756 (see previous item). The plates, which in the 1756 edition are signed, are here unsigned.
Cohen-De Ricci 328 (1756 Ed); Jcb (1)3:1112 (1756 Ed); Lewine, p. 157 (1756 Ed); Palau 76318; Quérard II:598 (1756 Ed); Sabin 21007 (1756 Ed). Terence Martin, “American Literature Discovers Columbus” in Christopher K. Lohmann, ed., Discovering Difference: Contemporary Essays in American Culture, 1993.
[171599] £800
IMPORTANT COLLECTION OF COLUMBUS DOCUMENTS
12. (COLUMBUS, Christopher.) SPOTORNO, Giovanni Battista (ed.). Codice diplomatico Columbo-Americano. Ossia raccolta di documenti originali e inediti, spettanti a Cristoforo Colombo alla scoperta ed al governo dell’America. Genoa: Stamperia e Fonderia Ponthenier, 1823
Quarto (287 × 214 mm), pp. lxxx, 348. Nineteenth-century paper-covered boards, gilt leather label, untrimmed. Portrait frontispiece, 4 plates (3 folding). With half-title. With half-title. Early blindstamps from the Theological Institute of Connecticut (now the Hartford Theological Seminary), modern bookplates on front pastedown, bookseller’s ticket on half title. Extremities rubbed and worn, head of spine peeling with minor paper loss, hinges cracked, a bit of light tanning, a few scattered fox marks. A very good copy overall.
First edition. “This most important and valuable collection consists of an historical memoir of Columbus . . . followed by the letters, notes, privileges, and other writings of the great navigator, comprising every authentic document” (Sabin).
Published by order of the Genoese government, this work comprises a useful early collection of primary documents relating to, as the introduction states, “the greatest event which has been seen for centuries, and of a hero who greatly honours Genoa, Italy, and Europe” (our translation).
The collected documents focus primarily on the diplomatic aspect of Columbus’s explorations, and contain many letters from the Spanish government and its monarchs. The volume is finely printed, with Spanish texts followed by Italian translations and annotations, and supplemented by plates of Columbus’s coat of arms, his bust, and two facsimile letters. A Spanish edition was printed in 1877.
Provenance: Alberto Parreño, with his bookplate on the front pastedown. Parreño was a Grolier Club member and a major collector of Spanish colonial materials. Palau 57144; Sabin 14644.
[171545]
£1,400
BRINGING TOGETHER FOUR EARLY IMPORTANT ACCOUNTS OF DISCOVERY
13. COLUMBUS, Christopher. The Spanish Letter … to Luis de Sant’ Angel Escribano de Racion of the Kingdom of Aragon dated 15 February 1493. Reprinted in Reduced Facsimile, and Translated from the Unique Copy of the Original Edition …; [bound with:] COLUMBUS, Christopher. The Latin Letter … Printed in 1493 and Announcing the Discovery of America Reproduced in Facsimile, with a Preface; [and:] HARIOT, Thomas. Narrative of the First English Plantation of Virginia; [and:] VESPUCCI, Amerigo. The First Four Voyages … Reprinted in Facsimile and Translated from the Rare Original Edition … London: Bernard Quaritch, 1893 4 works in 1, octavo (210 × 165 mm). Contemporary half morocco, spine gilt with raised bands, marbled boards, ruled in gilt, Narrative with 30 plates and one double-page map, First Four Voyages with frontispiece and folding map. Contemporary armorial bookplate and modern bookplate on front pastedown. Binding lightly rubbed, light tanning, a few fox marks. A very good copy.
All four publications in the series “Narratives of the Discoverers of America,” issued by Bernard Quaritch in 1893, handsomely bound in a single volume. The first two texts are both facsimile editions of Columbus’s letter of February 15, 1493, the first to announce the discovery of America, one printed in the original Spanish and the other in Latin translation. The first, the Spanish letter, is printed in reduced facsimile from the only known Spanish folio edition issued in early April of 1493, and is accompanied by a transcription of the text rendered in modern type together with an English translation. The Latin letter is reproduced in facsimile from an edition printed in Rome in 1493.
The third text, “Narrative of the First English Plantation of Virginia”, reprints Thomas Hariot’s A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. Hariot’s Report was first published in London in 1588 without illustrations, followed by illustrated Frankfurt editions (in English, German, and Latin) published by Theodor De Bry in 1590. The present text reproduces De Bry’s English-language edition, complete with facsimile plates of his engravings, after the original watercolors by John White.
The final text is a facsimile of Amerigo Vespucci’s letter to Pier Soderini, giving an account of his first four voyages, reproduced from a copy of the Italian-language edition published in Florence in 1505. It is accompanied by an English translation of the text and a reduced folding facsimile of “the Admiral’s map” (for which Vespucci is sometimes credited as the source) from the Strassburg Ptolemy of 1513.
Each of the four is preceded by a brief explanatory preface. While copies of each title in this series are often found individually, sometimes in their original wrappers, it is unusual to find all four titles bound together in a single volume, as here.
Sabin 99374 (Vespucci). [171651]
DETAILED FACSIMILE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT ANNOTATED BOOK FROM COLUMBUS’S LIBRARY
14. (COLUMBUS, Christopher.) PIUS II, Pont. Max. (formerly Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini). Historia rerum ubique gestarum. Cum locorum descriptione non finita Asia Minor incipit. Madrid: Testimonio Compañia Editorial, 1991–93
Small folio. Original elaborately blindstamped Cordovan leather, brass brads, gold-plated tacks, spine gilt with raised bands. With two commentary volumes, original printed wrappers and dust jackets. All housed in the original grey velvet case. Dust jackets slightly worn, a bit of dust soiling. Overall in fine condition.
First edition, one of 980 copies, of this elaborate and faithful facsimile of Christopher Columbus’s heavily annotated copy of Pius II’s Historia Rerum Ubique Gestarum
Considered one of the first modern cosmographies, the Historia includes a complete description of Asia and the Far East and sought to synthesize traditional geographical learning with more recent knowledge. The information on Asia is supplemented with material from Marco Polo and the then unpublished accounts of Oderic of Pordenone, a Franciscan friar who visited Western India, Southeast Asia, and China in the early 1300s, and Nicolò de’ Conti, a Venetian who wandered over South Asia for a quarter of a century or more before returning to Italy in the company of Near Eastern delegates in the summer of 1441.
This facsimile was produced to commemorate the 500th anniversary of his first voyage. In addition to the text, reproduced down to the patterns of tanning and paper flaws, two works in Spanish accompany this edition. One is a critical historical analysis of the work and its impact on Columbus, by Juan Perez de Tudela. The other is a full translation of the work into modern Spanish by Antonio Ramirez de Verger, including Columbus’s annotations. Despite the lasting influence of the book, this was only the second translation into modern Spanish.
Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Columbus, 1991.
[171677] £1,200
FINE FACSIMILE OF THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF COLUMBUS’S SON
15. (COLUMBUS, Christopher.) COLON, Hernando. El testamento de Hernando Colon. Madrid: Testimonio Compañia Editorial, 1993
Folio, 24 leaves. Original blindstamped calf, four small brass bosses on each board, spine gilt with raised bands. Modern bookplate on front pastedown. A fine copy.
First edition thus, number 172 of 980 copies. A highly detailed and magnificently reproduced facsimile of the last will and testament of Fernando Columbus (Hernán Colón), second son of the great explorer, originally created at Seville in 1539.
Fernando accompanied his father on his fourth voyage in 1502, and is perhaps best known as the author of his father’s first biography, considered one of the most important (and in many cases, the only) sources for the life of Columbus. Fernando was also a humanist and a great book collector, and much of the text of this testament concerns the distribution and care of his library (which included the books he inherited from his father). It is perhaps thanks to the detailed instructions in this document that nearly half of the 15,000-volume collection (including nearly 1,200 incunables and hundreds of Dürer prints) survives today at the Institución Colombina, at the Cathedral of Seville. This testament gives precise rules for the ordering and storage of the books, names a full-time librarian (Juan Pérez), and provides rules for expanding the collection.
This extremely faithful facsimile recreates the original document in color, extent, and size, and has been rendered at a level of detail down to edge wear, dampstaining, and even the cutting of precise worm trails.
This copy is without the volume of commentary in Spanish which originally accompanied the facsimile.
[171639]
£760
IMPORTANT SOURCE FOR COPERNICUS
16. CORDOBA, Alfonso de. Tabule astronomice
Elisabeth regine. Venice: Petrus Liechtenstein, 1503
Quarto (210 × 155 mm), in 2 parts: A-B8 (B8 blank), *A–*D *E4; 51 (of 52) leaves, the final leaf (final table recto with print er’s mark verso) supplied in excellent pen-and-ink facsimile, 9 contemporary manuscript leaves in the rear (i.e. 8 additional tables and a horoscope dated 6 April 1543 for Prince Hen ry). Later vellum, modern cloth ties. Woodcut initials. Minute foxing, a near fine copy.
First Cordoba edition of the Alfonsine tables, which provided data for computing the position of the Sun, Moon, and planets relative to the fixed stars, based on the development of Arabic astronomy and Greek clas sical and Hindu knowledge.
Concrete measurements with Toledo at the zero (i.e. prime) meridian started as early as 1252, and the first written elaboration of the Alfonsine Tables was carried out by two Jewish astronomers, Jehuda ben Mose and Isaac ben Sid, between 1263 and 1272. The tables were used and adapted all over Europe in the following cen tury, and the adaptations of Johannes de Saxonia in Par is in 1327 were selected by Radtolt for the first printed edition in Venice in 1483.
Alonso de Cordoba, born in Sevilla in about 1450, served as astronomer to the King of Portugal and published various books with astronomical tables. He adapted the Alfonsine tables using Seville as prime meridian and began his dating from the coronation of Isabella in Spain in 1474. The tables are divided into two parts: the first includes a dedication to Ferdinand V (1452–1516) and Isabella (1451–1504), King and Queen of Spain (who, most famously, sent Columbus on his voyage to discover a route to the East Indies) and a set of canons in sixty chapters explaining the use of the tables, with several examples; the second part contains the tables.
Cordoba’s adaptation was an important source for Copernicus, who referred to them in the “Commentariolus” (the first draft of his planetary theory, which remained unpublished until the late nineteenth century). “In the ‘Commentariolus’, Copernicus refers to the length of the year, and mentions the values given by four astronomers: Hipparchus, Ptolemy, al-Battani and a fourth referred to as ‘Hispalensis’ whose identity remained a mystery until the 20th century, when he was identified as Alfonso de Córdoba, a Spanish astronomer and doctor of arts and medicine probably born in 1458 in Seville” (Chabás).
Adams C2622; Honeyman 760; Palau 61824. José Chabás, “Astronomy for the Court in the Early Sixteenth Century. Alfonso de Córdoba and his Tabule Astronomice Elisabeth Regine” in Archive for History of Exact Sciences, Vol. 58, No. 3, 2004. [171630]
£4,800
17. CORTE REAL, Jerónimo. Successo do segundo cerco de Diu estando Dom Johao Mascarenhas por capitao da fortaleza. Anno de 1546. Lisbon: Antonio Gonçaluez, 1574
Octavo (176 × 120 mm): [–]2 32 11 23 A–2G8 H12 [I]2; 259 (of 262) leaves, pp. [xiv], 516 (= 506), [4], lacking first two leaves, final blank, portions of F8 and first leaf of table of contents, all supplied in 17th-century facsimile, table of contents misbound at end. Manuscript title within red ruled border, woodcut initials. Spanish eighteenth-century sheep, spine with raised bands, floral gilt tooling in compartments, red morocco label, armorial stamp of Charles Stuart, 1st Baron Stuart de Rothesay (1779–1845) on both covers, marbled endpapers, edges sprinkled red. Light wear at extremities, loss to spine ends, short splits at ends of inner hinges, but firm, front free endpaper neatly reinserted, old paper repairs in margin of a couple of leaves (with loss of last line on F8), crude tape repairs on F1 and F7-8 (causing small holes on F2 due to adhesion, affecting a couple of words), intermittent light damp staining, occasional marks. A good copy.
Very rare first edition of the most famous early poetical account of the second siege of Diu in 1546. The first work by Corte Real, “the Portuguese Virgil”, this epic poem celebrates the Portuguese victory against the forces of the Sultanate of Gujarat.
This is one of the earliest sources on the topic, together with the works of Diogo de Teive (Commentarius, 1548) and Damião de Góis (De bello Cambaico, 1549). The work is very rare in commerce, with only two copies traced in auction records in 1970 and 1929. USTC records twelve copies in libraries worldwide.
After establishing a foothold in India at Goa in 1510, the Portuguese worked their way northward up the coast of India, protecting their northern flank with a fortress at Diu in the Gujarat. In the mid-1530s, the Gujarati forces, aided by the Ottomans, began a series of counter-attacks against the westerners. The first siege of Diu, in 1538, was followed by a second in 1546, both ending in a victory for the Portuguese.
“The siege theme quickly attracted the attention of those who sought a subject of heroic proportions . . . Corte Real [includes] the names of all Portuguese who participated in the siege . . . the Cambayans, whom he classifies as Muslims, are the villains of his piece, for they are constantly plotting the destruction of the Portuguese. He introduces a few bits of local colour through his description of Indian festivals” (Lach, p. 136). The poem, in 21 cantos, has been valued by critics especially “on account of the profusion and beauty of its similes, which are almost always striking and original; and on account of its pen pictures which reveal in the poet a decided gift for poetry of a descriptive kind” (Pope, p. 57).
On the final leaf of the preliminaries are two manuscript sonnets, both unrecorded in print and in a distinct contemporary (or near-contemporary) hand. The first, on the recto, begins ‘Podeis Ni[m]phas colher hervas cheirosas’ (trimmed at foot with loss of last three lines). The second, on the verso, begins ‘Canta o Corte real a insigne empresa’ (slightly trimmed at fore-edge).
Provenance: a) Antonio Pereira da Maya (c.17th-century), his name inscribed at the bottom of the title page, and the manuscript pages apparently in his hand; b) Charles Stuart, Baron Stuart de Rothesay (1779–1845), British diplomat who, “as minister at Lisbon (1810–14) . . . made himself indispensable to Wellington, and he was made a member of the Portuguese regency council” (ODNB). In 1825 he was involved in a treaty which ensured the independence of Brazil from Portugal. His library was sold by auction in 1855; c) Francesco Orazio Beggi (fl. 1811–1864), his bookplate with monogram “FBO” on the front pastedown. Beggi was Commissary Director of Police in Modena in 1848, and later Police Surgeon in Turin. His library was sold in two parts by Puttick and Simpson in London in 1864–5. USTC 346079. Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, Vol. II, Book 2, 2010; Ethel M. Pope, India in Portuguese Literature, 1989. [171620]
£2,000
ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT EARLY DESCRIPTIONS OF MEXICO AND THE FIRST ENCOUNTER OF THE WEST WITH THE AZTEC CIVILIZATION
18. CORTES, Hernando. La preclara Narratione della Nuova Hispagna del Mare Oceano. Venice: Bernardino de Viano, 1524
Quarto (203 × 149 mm): A–Q4 R6: 74 leaves, unnumbered. Handsomely rebound to contemporary Venetian style in modern reddish-brown morocco decorated in gilt and blind. Woodcut border on title, printer’s device depicting an elephant bearing a cross on verso of final leaf. Large red wax seal of Cardinals of Hungary on titlepage.
First edition in Italian of Cortés’s second letter, based on the Latin edition by Savorgnanus of the same year. The text is the first major announcement of the discovery of major civilizations in the New World, and as such is a work of surpassing importance.
Cortés’s letter, dated October 30, 1520, provides a vivid account of the people he encountered en route to Tenochtitlan, painting a picture of an impressive empire centered around a great city. He relates his conflict with his rival Velazquez and gives a wonderful description of the buildings, institutions, and court at Tenochtitlan. It is here that Cortés provides a definitive name for the country, calling it “New Spain of the Ocean Sea”. This letter is also important for making reference to Cortés’s lost first letter, supposedly composed at Vera Cruz on July 10, 1520. Whether that letter was actually lost or suppressed by the Council of the Indies is unknown, but there is little doubt it once existed.
Some copies of this edition contain a plan of Mexico, not present here; the Church catalogue states, “Quaritch and others have doubted if such a map belongs to it; LeClerc records copies with and without the map”.
Church 55; European Americana 524/6; Harrisse 129; JCB (3)I:91; LeClerc 399; Medina (BHA) 86n; Medina Cortes 6; Palau 63191; Sabin 16951.
[171485] £20,000
THOROUGH DESCRIPTION OF PERU
19. COURTE DE LA BLANCHARDIÈRE, René. A Voyage to Peru; Performed by the Conde of St. Malo, in the Years 1745, 1746, 1747, 1748, and 1749. Written by the Chaplain. London: R. Griffiths, 1753
Duodecimo (168 × 97 mm), pp. xv, [1], 173, [3]. Contemporary panelled calf, rebacked to style, spine gilt, raised bands, modern gilt label, board edges ruled in gilt, all edges gilt. Contemporary ink inscription to front fly leaf. Corners rubbed, with some loss to leather on lower rear corner, contents lightly tanned with occasional offsetting throughout, occasional spot of foxing. A very good copy.
First edition of this English translation of Nouveau Voyage Fait au Perou by René Courte de la Blanchardière (Paris, 1751). “An account of a voyage aboard a merchant ship out of St. Malo bound for Peru, with descriptions of society, natural history, agricultural productions, trade, etc. The appendix . . . describes the mineral resources and commerce of Peru” (Hill).
ESTC T184165; Goldsmiths 8773.0B; Hill 387; Sabin 17177 (incorrectly dated 1752). [171665]
£1,200
ATTRACTIVE COLLECTED EDITION OF THREE FUNDAMENTAL TRANSLATIONS
20. EDEN, Richard; ARBOR, Edward (ed.). The first Three English books on America. [?1511] — 1555 A.D. Being chiefly Translations, Compilations, &c. by Richard Eden, From the Writings, Maps, &c., of Pietro Martire . . . Sebastian Munster . . . Sebastian Cabot . . . With Extracts, &c., from the Works of other Spanish, Italian, and German Writers of the Time. Birmingham: 1885
Quarto. Original brown cloth stamped in gilt and blind, untrimmed and largely unopened. Extremities worn, some rubbing to boards, light tanning and soiling to contents, a small number of flaws in upper margins from roughly opened pages. A very good copy.
First edition, number 2 of 125 copies signed by the editor. An attractive compilation focused primarily on the translations of Richard Eden, who first brought the extensive literature of the Age of Exploration into the English language.
This book includes quasi-facsimile recreations of Eden’s three most noteworthy translations: his Decades of the New World (translated mostly from Peter Martyr, augmented with excerpts from Oviedo, Pigafetta, and Lopez de Gomara), Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia, and an account of John Cabot’s 1497 journey to the coast of North America. The section on Cabot also makes mention of Frobisher and other early Canadian explorations. Each of these three works is exceedingly rare in its original form. The last complete, unsophisticated copy of Eden’s Decades to sell at auction was the Frank S. Streeter copy, purchased by William Reese for $768,000 in 2007 on behalf of a collector.
“Eden was the first Englishman who undertook to present, in a collective form, the astonishing results of the spirit of maritime enterprise, which had been everywhere awakened by the discovery of America. Nor was he a mere compiler. In point of learning, accuracy, and integrity, he is certainly superior to Hakluyt. [His] work is rendered more precious by information scattered through it, derived from the great seamen of the day, with whom the author’s turn of mind led him to associate” (Biddle, quoted in Sabin).
The editor, Edward Arber, was a fellow of King’s College and an accomplished producer of scholarly editions. He contributed additional related documents, a substantive preface, a thorough index, a timeline of Richard Eden’s life, and other helpful notes.
Sabin 1561 (ref).
[171645] £400
21. FABER DE BUDWEIS, Wenceslau. [Tabulae solis et lunae coniunctionum.] Opusculum tabularum utile verarum solis et lune coniunctionum. [Leipzig:] Martin Landsberg, [not before 1499]
Quarto (210 × 153 mm): A6 B4; 9 (of 10) leaves, lacking final blank. Bound in old manuscript leaf over boards. Title printed in red and 2 pages printed in red and black. Minor waterstaining in outer margin of scattered leaves, but a fresh unwashed copy, very good.
Very rare edition of this novel method for predicting the new and full moon, which offers an ingenious alternative to the Alfonsine tables and is among the rarest categories of astronomical ephemera from the incunable period.
Composed by Wenzel Faber (d. 1518), the Leipzig university professor, astronomer, and prolific author of printed astrological calendars, the Opusculum includes all the tables required to estimate times of the new and full moons occurring between the years 1377 and 1772. Replacing cumbersome iterative procedures of the Alfonsine tables with a single addition of results from a double-entry solar and a single-entry lunar table, Faber’s approach simplifies a table written c.1400 by Nicholaus de Heybech of Erfurt. Times of syzygy, reckoned to the nearest minute via such tables, were the most widely cited astronomical data of the incunable period, regularly appearing on the hundreds of broadside almanacs and multi-leaved astrological practica issued by the early printers.
Faber’s Opusculum was printed in two nearly identical editions using the types of Martin Landsberg of Leipzig in 1494–5 and not before 1499, both of which are rare. ISTC locates 13 holding institutions for this edition (only 2 in the US), though the BL copy is noted as “not held”, and the Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek copy is imperfect. The ISTC count also includes the queried location of a copy offered for sale in 1964 by Zeitlin and Verbrugge (Los Angeles), catalogue 208, item 114: the asking price was $500. Goff F9a; HC 6861; ISTC if00009500; Klebs 388.2; GW 9629. [171550] £12,000
A SKETCH OF RENAISSANCE MOSCOW
FABER, Johann. Ad serenissimum principem Ferdinandum Archiducem Austriae, Moscovitarum iuxta mare glaciale religio. Basel: apud Ioannem Bebelium, January 1526
Quarto (181 × 141 mm): A–C4 D6; 18 leaves, unnumbered. Modern limp paper boards imitating early carta rustica, endpapers renewed. Elaborate woodcut initial. Ownership stamp sometime removed from title page causing spot of skinning subsequently filled with Japanese paper, a couple of letters retouched in ink on verso, upper margin and one corner of title page repaired, some leaves reinforced at gutter (more visible on title and last leaf), intermittent marginal foxing and light fingersoiling, faint damp stain to lower corners, contents nonetheless presenting well. A very good copy.
Rare first edition of one of the earliest printed accounts of Russia. Faber, a lifelong friend of Erasmus and father confessor to Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, reports the information he gathered during an interview with two Russian diplomats who passed through Tübingen in 1525.
The envoys were Ivan Fedorovich Yaroslavskii and Semyen Borisovich Trofimov, returning to Russia after a meeting with Charles V in Spain. Their conversation with Faber was conducted through an interpreter, Vasilii Vlas, and revealed a considerable amount of information about the geography of Russia, its cities, government, language, schools, and particularly its religion. “According to Fabri, Russian Orthodoxy is the very embodiment of primitive Christianity and the Russians are pious, God-fearing and devout in the extreme . . . Fabri hints that not only would Russians make good allies against the Turks and Protestants, they would also be excellent models for Ferdinand’s subjects themselves” (Poe, pp. 25–6). The archduke, pleased with Faber’s book, recommended it for study to Herberstein before his second mission to Russia, and later Faber’s work formed the basis of Herberstein’s own research.
In his review of early modern ethnographical works on Russia, Marshall Poe lists Faber as one of the key authors alongside Contarini, Trakhaniot, Bomhover, Campensé, Giovio, and Herberstein. A theologian and jurist, Johannes Faber (1478–1541) was a fierce opponent of the Protestant reformation. In 1521, he was called by Ferdinand to serve as councilor of Tübingen, and eventually rewarded for his efforts by being appointed bishop of Vienna.
The title page verso features the text of a letter from Emperor Charles V to Vasili III Ivanovich, Grand Prince of Russia. The letter ends with salutations to Prince Vasili followed by a list of about twenty cities and regions over which he ruled.
This work is rare in commerce, with only one copy recorded at auction over 50 years ago.
Adams F-64; VD16 F189. Marshall T. Poe, A People Born to Slavery; Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography, 1476–1784, 2000.
[171589] £7,600
AN IMPORTANT MEDICAL AMERICANUM
23. FERRI, Alfonso. De ligni sancti multiplici medicina et vini exhibitione. Rome: Antonio Blado, 1537
Small quarto (204 × 145 mm): A–N4 O2 P4; 58 leaves, unnumbered. Bound with 8 additional leaves: a late fif teenth-century manuscript on the Commandments (ff. 1–2), a blank (f. 3), and a late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-cen tury Latin medical manuscript in an Italian cursive hand. Modern binding of old vellum. Large woodcut arms of Pope Paul III on title page. Foliated in an early hand through out. Wax stain in outer margin of leaves A1–B1 and K1–4, damp stains to leaves N3–P4, paper repair in margin of P4, intermittent light foxing and fingersoiling, manuscript leaves clean with a couple of minor marks. A very good copy.
First edition of this landmark treatise on the medici nal applications of the guaiacum tree, a species native to the Americas and introduced to Europe after the discovery. This copy shows enticing signs of early read ership, being annotated throughout; it also includes several manuscript pages of related material at the end.
De ligni sancti is one of the earliest medical works ded icated to guaiacum (“lignum sanctum”, the holy wood), which was first described by Ulrich von Hutten in his De guaiaci medicina et morbo gallico (1519). Ferri de scribes the tree and where to find it, noting that “many of the newly discovered islands produce it” and recommending the variety growing in San José as preferable (f. 3v). The treatise provides instructions on its preparation for medical purposes: the bark of the tree is ground into powder and boiled to create a syrup-like infusion. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, this was the most common treatment for syphilis, which Ferri describes in detail. In the book, however, Ferri lists and briefly describes many more illnesses or health concerns that can be cured with guaiacum, including headache, insomnia, memory loss, melancholy, vertigo, epilepsy, paralysis, bad breath, hernia, sterility, and ulcers.
The most innovative section of the treatise is Ferri’s introduction of a new method of preparing guaiacum, using wine instead of water, arguably more efficacious on the grounds that wine is more easily absorbed by the human body. He suggests a light white wine and indicates how to administer it and in what quantities.
This copy has marginalia in a couple of different late sixteenth-century or early–17th century hands throughout, mostly index notes, manicules, and underlinings. The most frequent annotator has also added, on the blank verso of the last page, a quote from Savonarola’s Practica Maior (1547, p. 272) concerning the medical use of another “lignum”, the “lignum aloe”, taken from the aloe plant.
Bound after Ferri’s text are:
a) Two leaves from a late fifteenth-century Latin manuscript commentary on the
Ten Commandments, focusing on those appearing on the second stone tablet and their punishments. At the bottom of the first leaf, just below a line describing the commandment “thou shall not commit adultery”, a sixteenth-century reader has scribbled “morbus syphilis, morbus gallicus”. This was known to be a sexually transmitted disease from at least 1530, after Fracastoro’s work on the topic; Fracastoro had also introduced the idea that syphilis could come as a consequence of one’s sin.
b) Five manuscript pages of a late sixteenth-century or early 17th-century manuscript containing paraphrased quotes from Antonio Fracanzani’s De morbo gallico fragmenta (1563) and Gabriele Falloppio’s De morbo gallico liber (1564). Numbered 21–25, these pages appear to have been extrapolated from a longer book. They deal with guaiacum and two other medicinal plants, known as “china root” and “sarsaparilla”; the first native to Asia and the second to central America. Both are species of the plant smilax which were used as remedies to syphilis in early modern Europe.
Durling 1506; EDIT16 CNCE 18863. Not in Heirs of Hippocrates or Garrison–Morton.
[171592] £5,200
WITH SIGNIFICANT PROVENANCE
24. FERRI, Alfonso. De ligni sancti multiplici medicina et vini exhibitione. Basel: [J. Bebel] 1538
Small octavo (157 × 100 mm): A–N8, O4; 213 (of 214) leaves, lacking final blank O4, pp. 201, [12]. Modern half calf and marbled boards, spine gilt with raised bands, edges sprinkled red. Woodcut printer’s device on title page, woodcut initials. Modern bookplate on
front pastedown, ink annotation and underlining to verso of G7 and recto of G8. Binding lightly rubbed, text evenly tanned, minimal foxing, light occasional soiling, dampstaining to leaves A4–A5 and K3–K5. A very good copy.
Second edition, with a particularly interesting provenance. It bears the ownership stamp of J. K. Proksch on the verso of the titlepage. Johann Karl Proksch (1840–1923) was an Austrian physician and historian of medicine, specializing in the treatment of venereal disease and other diseases of the skin. He is responsible for having compiled Die Litteratur über die Venerischen Krankheiten, a “monumental” bibliography, published between 1889 and 1891, of works on syphilis that has been described as still “the most comprehensive to date” (Wilson, p. 178).
Like the first, this second edition of Ferri’s De Ligni Sancti is rare institutionally and in the market. In addition to those copies held internationally, we locate only six holding institutions in the United States: New York Public Library, the University of Chicago, Indiana University, the National Library of Medicine, Brown University, and the Texas Medical Center Library.
Durling 1507; European Americana 538/5; Wellcome I:2240. J.K. Proksch, Die Litteratur über die Venerischen Krankheiten, Vol. 3, 1891, p. 456. Philip K. Wilson, Surgery, Skin and Syphilis: Daniel Turner’s London (1667–1741), 1999.
[171579]
£3,600
INCLUDING ONE OF THE EARLIEST PRINTED REFERENCES TO THE EUROPEAN DISCOVERY OF THE NEW WORLD
25. FICINUS, Marsilius; Baptista Mantuanus; Rabanus Maurus; Desiderius Erasmus. De triplici vita; De religione christiana; De patientia; De institutione clericorum; Lucubratiunculae. Strassburg, Venice, Pforzheim, Antwerp: various printers, 1499–1511
Five works in one vol., quarto (197 × 124 mm). Contemporary Erfurt quarter blindstamped pigskin over wooden boards by the Steifer Hirsch I binder, spine divided in four compartments by raised bands, ruled and decorated in blind with various tools, including a dog (Schunke-Schwenke Hund 36), a stag (Hirsch 35), a heart pierced by an arrow (Herz 75), a quadrifoliate flower (Blüte Vierblatt 112), and a rose (Rosette 581a), endbands sewn in three colors, remains of two fore-edge clasps, first two titles lettered on fore edge, remnants of stiff paper tabs to outer margin of first leaf of each work. Occasional contemporary annotations; armorial bookplate of Johann Lorenz Wolff (1650–1708), councillor and bailiff of Waldenburg. Lower corner of rear board split, leather replaced at top of front board, contents tanned with some occasional foxing and soiling (see note for individual works); overall, very good.
A fine Sammelband of Renaissance humanist writings, containing five separately issued incunables and post-incunables from both north and south of the Alps handsomely bound in contemporary blind-stamped pigskin backing wooden boards, probably by the Erfurt binder known as “Steiffer Hirsch I”.
Baptista Mantuanus’s De patientia, a treatise counselling patience and the acceptance of pain as a way of purification and spiritual elevation and of coming closer to God, was first published in Brescia in 1497. It contains one of the earliest printed references to Columbus’s discovery of America. In discussing the extent of the
law of Christ (bk. 3, chap. 11), Mantuan mentions “islands inhabited by man, also much larger than ours,” unknown to Strabo, Ptolemy, Pomponius Mela, and Pliny, but which have recently been found through the agency of the kings of Spain.
That work is preceded by two by Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499). De triplici vita, first published in Florence in 1489, is one of the most interesting psycho-medical texts of the Italian Renaissance, “the first treatise on the health of the intellectual” (Kaske & Clark, p. 3), to which is added the text of Ficino’s “Regimen” of the School of Salerno. The second work, De religione christiana, was first published in an authorized Italian translation in Florence in 1474, the original Latin in 1476 (the Latin text is included here). Seeking a synthesis of philosophy and religion, Ficino attempts to trace the origins of the religion of Christ to ancient sources. This edition adds De morte (attributed by Ficino to Xenocrates), Ficino’s Latin translation of a pseudo-Platonic text he first rendered from the Greek in 1464 at the request of his dying patron, Cosimo de’ Medici. Both works were prepared for the press by Johannes Adelphus (“Adelphus Mulingus” here), a Strassburg physician who prepared many humanist texts for publication in Germany, including several translations of Ficino’s works.
Rabanus’s ninth-century treatise De institutione clericorum was first printed in 1504; this second edition is expanded from a more extensive manuscript from Hirsau Abbey. The work promotes the views of Augustine and Gregory the Great on the proper training required for clerics.
The last work in the volume is the second edition of Erasmus’s Lucubrationes, first published in Antwerp in 1503, here printed from “the same formes but with a few errors corrected” (Ryle, p. 2). The publication brings together a variety of works by Erasmus in both prose and verse, including his “Oration on the Pursuit of Virtue”, “Prayer to Jesus, Son of the Virgin”, “Paean in Praise of the Virgin Mother”, “Handbook of the Christian Soldier”, “Letter to John Colet” and others.
1) Ficinus, Marsilius: De triplici vita: scilicet sana, longa & celitus. Una cum textu seu regimine sanitatis Salerni. Strassburg: from the shop of Johannes Schott, 1511. Signatures: a8 b-c4 d8 e-f4 g8 h-i4 k8 l-m4 n8 o-p4 q8 r4 s6; 98 leaves, including terminal blank. Some abrasion and small wormholes in title page with some loss to text. Small wormhole to lower margin of first five leaves, not affecting text. Twoinch closed tear in outer margin of leaf k4, touching text but without loss. BM STC German, p. 302; Durling 1541; VD16 F946.
2) Ficinus, Marsilius: De religione christiana et fidei pietate opusculum. Xenocrates de morte, eodem interprete. [Strassburg:] Johannes Knoblouch, 9 Dec. 1507. Signatures: a8 b-c4 d8 e-f4 g8 h-i4 k8 l-m4 n8 o-q4 r6; 90 leaves, unnumbered. Woodcut printer’s device on final recto. Adams F416; BM STC German, p. 302; VD16 F939.
3) Baptista Mantuanus: De patientia. [With additions of Helias Capreolus and Johannes Taberius.] Venice: Jacobus Pentius, de Leuco, 6 Sept. 1499. Signatures: a6 b-q8 r10; 136 leaves, unnumbered. Some dampstaining to top edge of text. BMC V 565; European Americana 499/2; Goff B80; HC 2408*; ISTC ib00080000.
4) Rabanus Maurus: De institutione clericorum ad Heistulphum Archiepiscopum libri tres. Pforzheim: Thomas Anshelm, Aug. 1505. Signatures: a6 b4 c-d6 e-f4 g-h6 i4 k-l6 m-o4 p-s6 t4 u6 x4; 108 leaves, unnumbered. Woodcut printer’s device at end. Dampstaining to lower corner of K1 and K2 and to top edge of text throughout. Contemporary annotations and underlining in red ink. Red capital strokes. BM STC German, p. 420; VD16 H5268.
5) Erasmus, Desiderius: Lucubratiunculae. Antwerp: Theodoricus Martinus, 6 Nov. 1509. Signatures: A8 B6 C8 D-O6 P8 Q6 R8; 110 leaves, unnumbered. Woodcut printer’s device to verso of final leaf. Small wormhole to about half the leaves at the end, with some loss to text. One-inch closed tear to lower edge of H3, not affecting text. Occasional soiling. Contemporary annotations and underlining in ink. Red capital strokes. Adams E694; Nijhoff & Kronenberg 836; Pettegree & Valsby, Netherlandish Books 11222.
Carol V. Kaske & John R. Clark, “Introduction” in Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life, 1989; Stephen Ryle, “Introductory Note” in Collected Works of Erasmus, Vol. 69, Spiritualia and Pastoralia, John W. O’Malley & Louis A. Perraud, eds. 1999.
[171625] £36,000
26. FITZGERALD, Edward (trans.). Rubaiyát of Omar Khayyám. The Astronomer-Poet of Persia. Rendered Into English Verse. New York: The Grolier Club, 1885
Octavo. Original floral-patterned paper wrappers heightened in gilt, smooth spine lettered in gilt, edges untrimmed. Chromolithographic publisher’s device on title page, initials and headpieces, black tailpieces. Gilt on wrappers slightly faded, couple of spots of foxing to edges, else clean: a near-fine copy.
First Grolier Club edition, number 132 of 150 copies printed on japon. The wrappers and text ornaments are reproduced in beautiful chromoli thography from illustrations by George and Wil liam Audsley and Owen Jones.
The Scottish Audsley brothers worked as architects and designers from the 1860s, completing several churches in the Gothic revival style in Liverpool and publishing books on ornaments and Japanese art. The design of the wrappers is taken from their Outlines of Ornament (1881), where it appears un der the name of “Persian B, diaper ornament”.
The headpieces come from examples in Owen Jones’s Grammar of Ornament (1856). Among the most influential design and colour theorists of the nineteenth century, Jones was a pivotal figure in the formation of the South Kensington Museum (later Victoria and Albert Museum) and is famous for his studies of Islamic decoration.
In 1929, Ambrose George Potter noted in his Rubaiyát bibliography that this edition was “now difficult to secure, even at very high price”. Two additional copies were printed on vellum. Potter 211.
LANDMARK OF EARLY MEDICAL LITERATURE
27. FRACASTORO, Girolamo. Syphilis, sive Morbus gallicus. Verona: [Nicolini da Sabbio, Stefano & fratelli?] 1530
Octavo (210 × 142 mm): a–e8; 37 (of 40) leaves, unnumbered, with original blanks e5, lacking final blanks e6–8. Recently bound in old vellum, smooth spine lettered in manuscript. Covers slightly bowed, lower margin of title page shaved, presumably to remove part of the early ownership inscription, and repaired with blank paper, margins of contents trimmed just slightly affecting manuscript annotations, small faint damp stain at head of first four pages, ink splashes in margins of leaves a7–8, sporadic minor mark, otherwise clean. A bright, wide-margined copy.
First edition of “the most famous of all medical poems” (Garrison–Morton), containing the earliest printed poetical reference to Columbus’s voyage. Elegantly printed in a charming italic type, the book is a compendium of the contemporary
European knowledge on the disease that spread throughout the continent following the American conquest.
The story of Columbus’s first voyage appears in book III of the poem, integrated within an epic narrative of the mythical origins of syphilis. After a long voyage, the Spaniards reach Ophyre, a fictional equivalent of Hispaniola. Here, they became infected after hunting the birds living in a forest of guaiacum trees sacred to the Sun God. They later meet an indigenous king who tells them the myth of the shepherd boy Syphilis, the first who was affected with the disease as a result of insulting Apollo. The sailors also learn that the extract obtained from the bark of the guaiacum trees (a species discovered by Columbus) has natural curative powers. Fracastoro’s poem become so well-known that the infection, which was first known as morbus gallicus (“French disease”), then took the name of Fracastoro’s character.
The other two books in the poem are more medical in content. The work is a fundamental source of information on the treatment methods for syphilis that were available to sixteenth-century doctors, the most common cures being quicksilver and sweating. To avoid the disease, Fracastoro also recommends following Galen’s guidelines for a healthy lifestyle: air, exercise and rest, sleep and walking, food and drink. The author is the first to recognise the venereal nature of the disease. Fracastoro also discusses the origin of syphilis, whether it has always existed in Europe or whether it came aboard ships from the New World. “Fracastoro finds it difficult to see syphilis as a new disease, instead he chooses to say that it is an old disease simply forgotten by temporal human beings . . . the disease is both ancient and new: ancient because it existed from the dawn of time, but new because Early Modern people forgot it” (Grigsby, p. 154). The origin question is today still object of scholarly debate, with several modern studies supporting the “pre-Columbian” theory.
This copy belonged to a member of the De Nobili family of Acquasparta (in Umbria, central Italy), with the ownership inscription “De Nobilibus ab Acquasparta” dated 1540 on the final blank e4 (repeated on the title page, though here only partly preserved). The identity of the owner is elusive, but his frequent annotations and underlinings indicate that he was an attentive reader with a good knowledge of contemporary and classical literature. He references the humanist Giovanni Pontano (1426–1503) and Virgil; in a longer note at page d5, he analyses the metrical structure of one verse.
Durling 1641; EDIT16 CNCE 19606; European Americana 530/14; Garrison–Morton 2364; Heirs of Hippocrates (online) 171; JCB Italians 50. Byron Lee Grigsby, Pestilence in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature, 2004.
[171591]
£12,000
POST-INCUNABLE ENCYCLOPEDIA WITH AN ENTRY ON COLUMBUS
28. FREGOSO, Battista. De dictis factisque memorabilibus collectanea a Camilo Gilino Latina facta. [Milan:] Jacobus Ferrarius Mediolani, 1509
Folio (297 × 212 mm): A6 a–x8 y6 z–2f8 2g–2k6/8 2l–2m6 2n–2q8 2r–2u8/6; 336 leaves, unnumbered. Old vellum over boards, spine lettered in manuscript. Hundreds of woodcut initials, from three to eight lines. Occasional inscriptions to margins throughout, a handful of contemporary manuscript shoulder notes. Vellum somewhat stained and worn, light scattered foxing and staining, minor worming to margins of first and last leaves, a few interior pages with worming in text without significant loss, discoloration and adhesive residue on several pages where former censorship slips have been removed. A very good copy.
First edition of this curious encyclopedia penned by an exiled Genoese doge, literally titled “Battista Fregoso’s collection of memorable sayings and deeds”, including an early recognition of Columbus.
Fregoso was Doge of Genoa from 1478 to 1483, after which he was exiled and spent the rest of his life alternately writing, studying, and attempting to return to his homeland. The Italian manuscript for this work was written during his exile, but not published in his lifetime – this is the first edition, translated into Latin by Camilo Gilino shortly after the author’s death.
Organized somewhat haphazardly into nine books, the text takes the form of a se-
quence of brief anecdotes and aphorisms on a wide variety of topics. Some of these include a chapter “On sleep” (which relates dozens of famous and little-known historical and apocryphal stories that somehow involve sleep or dreams), military prowess, self-confidence, piety, filial devotion, “Women who excelled in their education” (including Sappho and Zenobia), how to spend leisure time, and many more. The majority of the subjects come from Greek and Roman antiquity, though other examples are taken from the more recent past. Despite being ousted as Doge by his uncle and exiled to Rome, the author clearly maintained a high opinion of his home, and “the Genoese people” as a whole are frequently cited for examples of virtue and great deeds.
Similarly, a paragraph about Columbus immediately follows one discussing Gutenberg (who “surpassed all of the mechanical arts not only of late, but of antiquity”) on 2lv, both under the heading, “How great are the effects of certain arts”. It reads in rough translation: “The effects of the nautical and cosmographical arts have also been admirable. These were displayed dramatically by Christopher Columbus, Genoese national, in the year of our lord 1493. He reached India from Cadiz over the ocean in thirty-one days, just as he had predicted he would do, and frequently argued before the Castilian King Ferdinand, who did not believe it was possible. It was indeed true that it was easy to sail a direct course from Cadiz to India, however nobody before him had ever taken that shorter route. Even though they had to sail past the coast of Ethiopia through the southern ocean, taking much time and inviting many dangers, they still only just reached the farthest reaches of India”.
This copy has interesting provenance, formerly belonging to the Capuchin Order of Verona, with their stamp on several pages and early ownership inscriptions on the title page. The Capuchin Order first came to Verona in 1535, shortly after this book’s publication, and remained there until purged by Napoleon in 1810, at which point most of their library was lost. The Order apparently had a complicated history with this copy – it can be seen that at some point in time, every entry relating to a pope was pasted over and censored, but at some later date these censorship slips were removed. Several of these sections are also accompanied by early manuscript annotations (such as next to the fable of Pope Joan, simply reading “Hoc est falsus”), though it is not clear if these notes were added before or after the passages were censored.
Adams F1148; EDIT 16 CNCE 19894; European Americana 509/6; Harrisse Additions 34; JCB (3)I:49; Sabin 26140. [171631]
£4,800
29. GIGANTI, Girolamo. Tractatus de pensionibus ecclesiasticis, cum additionibus eiusdem auctoris nunc primum in lucem editis. Venice: Ad candentis Salamandre insigne, 1570
Octavo (194 × 144 mm): a–f4 A–T8; 87 (of 88) leaves, lacking leaf b1 with portrait of author (recto) and “Auctoris ad Lectorem” (verso), pp. [23], 151, [1], occasional errors in foliation as issued. Contemporary limp vellum, evidence of ties, spine lettered in manuscript. Woodcut printer’s device to titlepage, similar headpiece and initials. Modern bookplate on front pastedown, ex-library, with ink stamp to titlepage, ink inscription (scratched out) on verso of titlepage, scattered manuscript annotations and underlining in ink. Binding rubbed
and lightly worn with a few tears to spine, light to moderate foxing and occasional soiling to contents. A very good copy.
Second Venetian edition, enlarged from the first of 1542, of this legal treatise on ecclesiastical pensions by the Venetian jurist Girolamo Giganti (d. 1560), one of a few such sixteenth-century works dedicated to the subject. According to the title page, this edition contains additions by the author published here for the first time (“cum additionibus eiusdem auctoris nunc primum in lucem editis”).
“Annual pensions”, explains Richard H. Helmholz, “were a long-established feature of ecclesiastical life. They had many legitimate uses”, but they were also subject to legal contest and abuse. Helmholz notes that while “no separate title of the Corpus iuris canonici was devoted to the subject”, such pensions were “treated by name in titles dealing with ecclesiastical obligations and in time the subject spawned a modest academic literature” (pp. 72–3).
The work takes the form of one hundred quaestiones, each addressing a particular aspect of the subject, and includes forms or examples of applications for pension transfers and cancellations. This edition includes the original dedication to Cardinal Benedetto Accolti, dated 1542, as well as a table of contents listing the quaestiones and a detailed index. The title page has no printer’s name, only the woodcut device depicting a crowned salamander surrounded by flames. A similar device and imprint was used by many Venetian printers at this time.
Between the first and second editions published in Venice, there were several editions published in Lyon between 1545 and 1556 by the humanist bookseller-printer Guillaume Rouillé, who had served his apprenticeship in Venice and relied heavily on Venetian texts, which he sold in Lyon “sub scuto Veneto”. He issued another edition in 1572, and the work was still being reprinted in Venice and elsewhere into the seventeenth century.
Not in Adams; EDIT16 CNCE 20975. Richard H. Helmholz, “Annuities and Annual Pensions” in Laws, Lawyers and Texts: Studies in Medieval Legal History in Honour of Paul Brand, ed. Susanne Jenks, Jonathan Rose, and Christopher Whittick, 2012.
[171629] £1,200
EARLY ITALIAN EDITION OF A SEMINAL MILITARY BIOGRAPHY
30. GIOVIO, Paolo; DOMENICHI, Lodovico (trans.). La vita di Consalvo Ferrando di Cordova detto Il Gran Capitano. Venice: Lodovico di Avanzi, 1557
Small octavo (150 × 93 mm): A–S8; 143 (of 144) leaves, lacking final blank; pp. 271, [17]. Early vellum, manuscript spine title. Woodcut printer’s device on title page, woodcut initials throughout text. Bookplate on rear pastedown, early pen trials on verso of last leaf. Light soiling and wear, front joint cracked, minor worming along rear joint. Fading dampstain to foot of first four leaves, early repairs to blank verso of registry leaf. Scattered staining and foxing, but generally clean internally. About very good.
Third edition in Italian of this seminal biography of “El Gran Capitán”, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, hero of the Conquest of Granada and the Italian Wars. It was first published in Latin in 1549, as Book III of the Italian historian and biographer Giovio’s Vitae Virorum Illustrium. Giovio was by that time Bishop of Nocera de’ Pagani and had begun his narrative of the ongoing Italian Wars, though he is best known in the field of travel and exploration for De legatione Basilii Magni Principis Moschoviae, which included details of Russia and Muscovy gleaned from the Russian ambassador Dmitry Gerasimov, who visited Pope Clement VII in 1525.
The work is an early biography of Fernández de Córdoba, who died in 1515 in Granada, the territory he helped conquer for Spain. He is credited as one of the first Europeans to make effective use of firearms, and his many victories and shrewd political mind made him a major figure across Europe in the late fifteenth century. His continual success in the Italian Wars earned him the moniker of “El Gran Capitán”, and he enjoyed immense popularity as Viceroy of Naples until removed by Ferdinand II in 1507. In 1522, he was reinterred at the crossing of the Royal Monastery of St. Jerome, which was completed after his death and whose elaborate interior decoration focuses particularly on the Gran Capitán’s achievements. This translation (first published in 1550, reprinted in 1552) was commissioned by Fernández de Córdoba’s son-in-law and did much to rehabilitate the general’s reputation, which had suffered following his conflict with Ferdinand II.
Provenance: Early ownership inscription, washed, on title page, “Di Giuseppe Ch[?]”. 17th century ownership inscription “Di Benedetto Alessandri, Monaco di d. Niccoló del Lido di Venezia” (“of Benedetto Alessandri, monk at the Monastery of San Nicolò del Lido, in Venice”), on verso of title page. Ca. 17th-century ownership inscription on front free endpaper, cancelled, (“A Venezia” still legible at end). Ownership inscription “Ex libris Aloysii Braccini Flor” below; perhaps Luigi Braccini (Florence, 1750–1780), musician, composer, and priest. From the library of Franz Pollack von Parnau (1903–1981), Viennese industrialist and book collector, owner of a significant library at the Palais Pollack-Parnau on Schwarzenbergplatz, his bookplate on the front pastedown. Adams G688; Brunet III:483; EDIT16 CNCE 21216; Graesse III, p. 490. [171580]
£1,600
A STUDY OF ANCIENT NAVIGATION IN THE AGE OF DISCOVERY
GIRALDI, Lilio Gregorio. De re nautica libellus, admiranda quadam & recondita eruditione refertus, nunc primum & natus & aeditus. Basel: [Johann Bebel] apud Mich. Insingrinium, 1540; [bound after:] RICCIO, Michele. De regibus Francorum libri III. De regibus Hispaniae libri III. De regibus Hierosolymorum liber I. De regibus Neapolis & Siciliae libri IIII. De regibus Ungariae libri II. Basel: Froben, 1534 [colophon: 1535]
Two works in one, small octavo (170 × 112 mm): ; A–T8 V4; 144 and 156 leaves, pp. 276, [12]; pp. [6], 306. Contemporary German pigskin over bevelled boards, spine with blind-ruled raised bands, later manuscript lettering in compartments, concentric frames to covers incorporating blind tools and rolls of leaves, flowers, and angels, original engraved brass anchor plates, clasps, and catchplates. Printer’s device on both title pages and last page of first work, elaborate woodcut initials. Residue of old library label at foot of spine. Small loss of leather on spine exposing band underneath, a few marks to covers, the binding nonetheless presenting attractively, small worm hole in margin of first two leaves of first work and last two leaves of second work, paper flaw causing two short tears on title page of second work (touching printer’s device and text on verso, without loss), contents generally clean. An exceptionally bright and well-margined copy.
First edition of one of the earliest printed treatises on ancient seafaring, including an early reference to the European discovery of America and the role played by Italian pilots sailing on Spanish and Portuguese ships. Printed in Basel, the work is bound in a handsome contemporary German blind-stamped binding.
The discovery of an ancient Roman ship laying at the bottom of lake Nemi (south of Rome) in the late fifteenth century marked the beginning of modern studies into the archaeology of seafaring. Giraldi’s De re nautica libellus (“A small book on navigation”) is concerned with Greek and Roman shipbuilding and navigation, discussing the types of ships that were in use, their shapes, parts (mentioned with both Greek and Latin names), construction and decoration methods. The treatise also describes the equipment they carried, such as oars and ropes, and includes a list of common nautical terms in Latin. Giraldi draws his information from classical authors, including Homer, Aristotle, Aristophanes, Erodotus, Tucidides, Cicero, Horace, Ovid, Lucretius, Livy, Pliny, and Vitruvius. He mentions the Nemi ship, quoting Leon Battista Alberti.
Giraldi’s work was preceded only by Lazare de Baïf’s De re navali (1536) and a couple of other texts preserved only in manuscript. The contents were later among
the sources consulted by Pirro Ligorio for his naval treatise Libro delle navi, appearing in Book 12 of his famous encyclopaedia of Roman antiquities (1569–1583).
Page 5 contains an early reference to America: “Recently the Italian pilots of the fleets of Lusitania and Spain, having observed the south pole star, began to direct their voyages to many countries which were little known to the ancient writers . . . so that they are now said to have discovered a new world”.
Bound before Giraldi’s work is the second collected edition of Michele Riccio’s biographies of the Christian kings of France, Spain, Jerusalem, Naples, Sicily, and Hungary. The collection was first published in 1517; De regibus Francorum had previously appeared in a separate printing in 1505. An Italian-born French historian and lawyer, Riccio (1445–1515) worked at the court of various rulers including Ferdinand I of Naples, Kings Charles VIII and Louis XII of France, and Pope Julius II.
Giraldi: VD16 G2109; not in Sabin. Riccio: VD16 R2174. [171559]
£2,000
THE REAL PRESTER JOHN
GÓIS, Damião de. Fides, Religio, Moresque Aethiopum sub Imperio Preciosi Ioannis (quem vulgo Presbyterum Ioannem vocant) degentium, una cum enarratione confoederationis ac amicitiae inter ipsos Aethiopum imperatores, & reges Lusitaniae. Aliquot item epistolae ipsi operi insertae, ac lectu dignissimae Helenae aviae Davidis Preciosi Ioannis, ac ipsius etiam Davidis, ad pontificem romanum & Emmanuelem, ac Ioannnem Lusitanie reges, eodem Damiano a Goes, ac Paulo Iovio interpretibus. Deploratio Lappianae gentis. Paris: apud Christianum Wechelum, 1541
Octavo (164 × 102 mm): a–f8 g4; 51 (of 52) leaves, lacking final leaf g4 with printer’s device, pp. 102 (p. 102 misnumbered 96). Late nineteenth-century vellum, smooth spine divided by blind fillets, covers ruled in blind, marbled endpapers. Woodcut initials. Some soiling to vellum, contents uniformly lightly toned, outer margins shaved sometimes affecting manuscript annotations, intermittent marginal damp stains, small worm trail to margin of leaves f3 to the end near gutter just touching a couple of letters, occasional light fingersoiling or small mark. A very good copy.
Second edition, following the first of the previous year. This was one of the key books debunking the medieval legend of Prester John, and it also contains an important account of Ethiopia, which features the earliest example of Ge’ez lettering in print.
The first part of the work is Góis’s history of the Portuguese search for Prester John from Prince Henry the Navigator up to the first Portuguese embassy to Ethiopia of 1520–7. This section includes a series of letters between Emperor Lebna Dengel and Pope Clement VII, which previously appeared in Álvares’s Legatio David Aethiopiae regis (1544) and relate to the embassy. Góis’s narrative casts light on connections between Ethiopia and the Islamic World. It includes discussions of trade between Ethiopian and Arab merchants and a description of an Ottoman embassy from Cairo to Ethiopia that passed through Suez. Notably, it also contains information of the importance of the Arabic language in the Horn of Africa, giving the Arabic title of the emperor of Ethiopia and describing how he had been taught Arabic as a child.
The second part is a direct translation of the Ethiopian priest Saga za Ab’s treatise on the beliefs of the Ethiopian church. The humanist scholar and traveller Góis hoped his work would support the Monophysite Ethiopian Church in reconciliation with the Western Christian community. However, Catholic theologians were quick to detect in Saga z-Ab’s apology for his church a plethora of Jewish, Moorish, and Lutheran “superstitions”, and the book was condemned by the Portuguese Inquisition.
Presbyterum Ioannem -
formation provided by Saga z-Ab’, who informed Góis that the title of Prester John was a simple misnomer, the actual name for the Ethiopian ruler being Jan , the idea that associating the Ethiopian negus with the mythical Prester John was wrong became widespread in
The supplementary text is Góis’s treatise on the Laplanders (Deploratio Lappianae gentis), one of the earliest by a foreigner. Góis was a man with unusual respect for other peoples’ customs and beliefs, and here he makes a strong appeal for better treatment of the Lapps, who refused to become Christians.
This copy has a few contemporary annotations, which are mainly index notes, emphases, and underlinings. The most interesting is at page 94, where the reader transcribes the sentence in Ge’ez characters with a couple of variations, apparently correcting the printed text. Underneath, also in Ge’ez characters, the annotator writes “Wanag: Segad”, another name by which Lebna Dengel was known, meaning “to whom the lions bow”.
Provenance: Dr Bent Juel-Jensen (1922–2006), Danish bibliophile, collector, and Medical Officer to the University of Oxford, with his Ethiopian bookplate on the front pastedown; label of Hans Joachim Wirkner un Sohn, with motto “non sum qualis eram” on rear pastedown.
Fumagalli 2247; Sabin 27688 (reference to Columbus at p. 8). Andreu Martínez d’Alòs-Moner, Envoys of a Human God: The Jesuit Mission to Christian Ethiopia, 1557–1632, 2015.
171539] £4,000
THE PORTUGUESE IN AFRICA, INDIA, AND THE AMERICAS
GÓIS, Damião de, and others. De rebus Hispanicis, Lusitanicis, Aragonicis, Indicis & Aethiopicis. Damiani à Goes, Lusitani, Hieronymi Pauli, Barcinonensis, Hieronymi Blanci, Caesaraugustani, Iacobi Teuij, Lusitani, opera. Quorum seriem, vide lector, pag. sexta. Partim ex manuscriptis nunc primum eruta, partim auctiora edita. Cologne: Officina Birckmannica, sumptibus Arnoldi Mylius, 1602
Octavo (145 × 90mm): *8 2*4 A–2G8 2H2; 254 leaves, pp. [xxiv], 443 [= 444, some mispagination at end]. Nineteenth-century marbled boards, red morocco spine label. Armorial woodcut on title; fullpage engraved portrait of Damian a Goes by Johann Hogenburg on *4r, some Ge’ez letters. Very light waterstains toward head of a number of leaves, general light age browning due to quality of paper stock. Provenance: early German ownership inscription at foot of title; Bent Juel-Jensen, his Ethiopic bookplate on the front pastedown, from A. & C. Sokol, item 53, cat. 5, Nov. 1984.
First edition thus, a compilation of the works of Damião de Góis, Diogo de Teive, Jeroni Pau, and Jerónimo de Blancas on the history of Spain and Portugal with regards to their overseas conquests in Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
The dominant author here is the Portuguese humanist Góis. The compilation includes his Commentarii rerum gestarum in India citra Gangem a Lusitanis anno 1538 (Louvain, 1539), his short polemical treatise Hispania (Louvain, 1540); Fides, Religio, Moresque Aethiopum (Louvain, 1540), including his
AN IMPORTANT GUIDE TO THE EARLY EUROPEAN DIPLOMACY OF THE AMERICAS
34. GOTTSCHALK, Paul. The Earliest Diplomatic Documents on America. The Papal Bulls of 1493 and the Treaty of Tordesillas Reproduced and Translated. Berlin: Paul Gottschalk, 1927
Folio. Original quarter vellum, spine lettered in gilt, tan cloth sides. With 130 facsimiles. Modern bookplate on front pastedown. Light shelf wear, vellum and front board stained, cloth beginning to peel from front board, contents clean. A very good copy.
First edition, one of 172 copies, 150 of which were offered for sale. The four Bulls issued by Pope Alexander VI in 1493, as well as the Treaty of Tordesillas between Spain and Portugal of 1494, set the course for the early division of exploration of the New World and Asia.
As a result of the “lines of demarcation” drawn between the two nations, Portugal was given rights to most of Asia but was confined to Brazil in the Americas, while Spain was given free rein in nearly all of North and South America.
Gottschalk provides historical introductions to each of the documents, and reproduces the four Bulls and the Treaty in full-size facsimiles. Also included are facsimiles of three early maps showing the line of demarcation with regard to New World exploration. Gottschalk differs from the estimable Frances Davenport, who identifies pre-Columbian papal bulls of 1455, 1456, and 1481, as having a theoretical relationship to the future discovery and exploration in the Americas. Despite that disagreement this work, giving full facsimiles and historical context for the four earliest diplomatic documents relating directly to the Americas, is a very valuable source.
Davenport 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 (ref).
[171674]
£1,200
ITALIAN MERCHANT
35. JOHANNES DE STRASBURG. Manuscript abacus treatise [in Italian]. [Northern Italy?]: 18 April 1419
Folio (290 × 220 mm), 47 vellum leaves, foliated (with a few errors), lacking ff. 1–6, 8(?), and an indeterminate number of leaves between f. 46 and colophon. Text written in brown ink in a charming corsiva mercantesca, headings, paragraph marks, and capital strokes in red; tables and geometrical diagrams in text. Bound in 20th-century dark blue calf, spine with blind and gilt ruled raised bands, red morocco label, gilt fillet frames to covers with fleurons at corners. Some natural discoloration to vellum, occasional creasing (mainly to initial and final leaves), stain on first leaf obscuring a couple of words each from 7 lines on recto, lower corners of a few final leaves chipped, last leaf browned and stained not affecting legibility of main text, occasional and mainly marginal smaller marks including ink splashes and wax stains. A very good copy.
A rare unpublished abacus manuscript, unrecorded by Van Egmond. A source of information on Renaissance mathematics and business, it is notable for its early date, the copyist’s signature, and for its well-structured didactic contents, attractively presented in a folio written on vellum rather than the more common paper quarto notebooks.
Van Egmond records 300 surviving abacus manuscripts, dated between the thirteenth century and the year 1600: 284 in institutions, 4 held privately, 9 unlocated, and 3 lost. We have traced only one other unrecorded example in commerce: on
10 paper leaves and dated c.1400, sold at Sotheby’s in 1999. Our manuscript is the earliest of six in private hands.
Abacus manuscripts (libri d’abbaco or abbaci) of the Late Medieval and Renaissance period were Italian mathematical works with a practical focus; they collected mathematical problems related primarily to business and commerce. Leonardo Pisano’s 1202 Liber Abbaci started the tradition, which spread through Tuscany and into northern Italy. The oldest known vernacular example dates from 1290. Schools of abacus, where abacus teachers (maestri) trained children, existed at least from 1284. All educated men of Renaissance Florence, including Niccolo Machiavelli and Leonardo da Vinci, gained their knowledge in these schools. They played a key role in diffusing the Hindu-Arabic system in Europe.
The contents here follow the standard structure described by Van Egmond and are divided into well-organized sections. After the short initial lacuna, which would have likely contained a description of the Hindu-Arabic numerals and of the four arithmetical operations, the manuscript begins with a series of recreational and business problems. Examples of recreational problems include “find a number” problems (e.g. find all the even numbers between 2 and 46), and series and progression problems (some featuring travelers, e.g. twins who travel at different speeds). Business-related exercises are concerned with money and purchase (e.g. “a man has 40 denari and wants to purchase birds of different species”), calculation of proportions using the “rule of the three”, interest (including simple and compound interest), partnership (e.g. how to divide profits), loans, and barter. This section is followed by a few pages on the “regola della cosa” (“the rule of the thing”), another name for algebra, showing how to solve equations. At the end is a series of geometrical problems, all illustrated with diagrams, beginning with circles (e.g. how to calculate the diameter), moving on to squares, rectangles and triangles, including an impossible problem (below the illustration, the scribe wrote “non si puo fare”, meaning “it cannot be done”).
This example, produced in folio on vellum, with the contents presented in a sensible order and in a charming hand, falls in the category defined by Van Egmond as “libreria treatises”. As opposed to the “notebooks”, which are random collections of problems gathered without organization, “libreria treatises” were produced by professional scribes for sale to wealthy merchants, composed by maestri to be used in teaching, or written by their students. Johannes of Strasburg’s name is unrecorded by Van Elmond and his identity remains elusive; he copied the manuscript, but whether he was also the primary user is unclear. Despite various textual references to Tuscany (perhaps expected as this was the origin of the manuscript tradition), the mention of Bologna and Paris in problems concerning distances between cities and the presence of a section on the prices of gold in “Bolognini” (the currency of Bologna), instead point towards a northern Italian production.
Van Egmond writes that the abbaci are of exceptional historical value, shedding light on many aspects of Renaissance culture. “Mathematics, business, economics, art, linguistics, and palaeography – in all these fields the abbaci provide valuable and sometimes unique sources of information . . . The myriads of business problems contained in the abbaci offer a series of vignettes into the microcosm of
Renaissance business operation – the monies, goods, and methods of exchange that make any economy a functioning system . . . The abbaci are also an integral part of the study of ‘merchant culture’ . . . [and] provide insights into the mental makeup of this important class of society” (pp. 12–15). Preserving regional and dialectical variations, they constitute “an excellent source for a close study of the lower class spoken vernacular . . . They are one of our best sources for the lexicon and grammar of the Renaissance merchant” (p. 14). They also provide a record of the development through time of the forms of Arabic numerals until they were adapted for printing.
Provenance:
a) Signed at the end: “Joh[ann]es de Strasburg”. His name not in Van Egmond, unidentified.
b) Later ownership inscription, datable to the end of the fifteenth century or beginning of the sixteenth century, on the last page below the colophon: “Questo libro e di me Piero di bto”. Piero’s inscription is repeated multiple times on the verso of the last leaf, in Latin and Italian, though here mostly illegible. The abbreviation “bto” could be interpreted in different ways, e.g. “Beato”, “Berto”, or “Barto”. One Piero di Berto di Leonardo Berti was active in Florentine politics in the mid-fifteenth century; his name appears in the elections of the Arte della Seta (the Silk Guild of Florence) in 1470, indicating that he was a silk merchant or manufacturer (several cloth-related problems appear in the present manuscript). “He must have moved in Florence’s highest social and cultural circles and been in favour with the Medici” (Jennings, p. 195).
c) ca. sixteenth-century note on verso of last leaf: “Exerat in Turcas tua me Ludovice furentes / dextera! Graiorum sanguinis ultor ero./ Corruet imperium Mahumetis, et inclyta rursus / Gallorum (?) virtus te petet astra duce” (“Let your right hand, Louis, draw me against the furious Turks, and I will be the avenger of the blood of the Greeks. The Empire of Mahomet will fall, and again will the renowned valor of the French, with you for leader, reach to heaven”). This verses were composed by Pope Pius II (Piccolomini) in 1462 and engraved on a sword that he sent to King Louis XI of France.
d) 17th-century annotations in the margins of leaves 42–46 adding geometrical problems with diagrams.
d) a few marginal pencil annotations in Italian in a modern hand.
Warren Van Egmond, Practical Mathematics in the Italian Renaissance: A Catalogue of Italian Abbacus Manuscripts and Printed Books to 1600, 1980; Lauren McGuire Jennings, Senza Vestimenta: The Literary Tradition of Trecento Song, 2014. See: Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, 1989.
[171633] £60,000
Byzantine emperor Manuel I Komnenos from a Christian monarch, descendant of one of the Three Magi and king of India, ruler of a vast territory extending from Persia to China. The text suggests its author was familiar with the Romance of Alexander and the stories of Saint Thomas the Apostle’s proselytizing in India recorded in the early third-century apocryphal account known as the Acts of Thomas.
From the mid-thirteenth century, when the Mongol conquests made Asia less inaccessible, western travellers were alert for signs of Prester John, who appears in such accounts as those of Marco Polo, Odoric of Pordenone and Sir John Mandeville. His supposed location proved elusive and was frequently changed, but the hope of finding him never dimmed. By the fifteenth century, the era of both the advent of printing and the beginning of the great phase of European expansion overseas, he was thought by many to reside in Ethiopia, considered to lie in the “Indies” and often confused with India (itself a much vaguer location than today’s subcontinent).
“This confusion between India and Ethiopia, the belief that Prester John was to be found in either and that the two might in some sense be the same, gave encouragement to the Portuguese when in the fifteenth century they commenced those voyages of discovery along the west coast of Africa usually associated with the name of Prince Henry the Navigator. There is ample evidence that they hoped to find India as well as Prester John and believed that Africa would lead them to both. The argument about whether Henry was concerned to find India or only Prester John, which has preoccupied some scholars, is somewhat ridiculous. The two were part of the same problem” (Beckingham, p. 280). Columbus, whose annotations in his copy of Marco Polo refer to Prester John, thought he had found him in Cuba, while Vasco da Gama carried letters of accreditation to Prester John on the epoch-making voyage that discovered the oceanic route to Asia.
This edition adds:
1) An anonymous text known as “Patriarch John’s report”, relating that a patriarch named John came to Rome in 1122 and transmitting the information John gathered about the “Christian Indies”. It contains the legend of St. Thomas’s Indian shrine and the saint’s miracle-working right hand. This was first published in c.1479–82, as part of the first Latin edition of Prester John’s letter.
2) A treatise on the reign of Prester John, with focus on “its location, flora, fauna, minerals, and of course monsters and other wonders” (Rogers; pp. 83–4). This was first printed as the final portion of the 1486 edition of Foresti da Bergamo’s Supplementum Chronicarum
3) Alius tractatus, literally “another treatise” concerning India’s geography, fauna, flora, and population, first published in Govaert Back’s collection of Hesse’s Itinerarius and other travel narratives dated between 1496 and 1499.
Goff J398; GW M14512; Klebs 561.5; Pr 4015; ISTC ij00398000. C. F. Beckingham, “The Quest for Prester John”, in Beckingham & Hamilton, eds., Prester John, the Mongols and the Ten Lost Tribes, Aldershot, 1996; Francis Millet Rogers, The Quest for Eastern Christians: Travels and Rumor in the Age of Discovery, 1962.
[171616] £44,000
37. LÓPEZ DE GÓMARA, Francisco. Historia de Mexico, con el descubrimiento de la nueva España conquistada por el muy illustre [sic] y valeroso Principe don Fernando Cortes, Marques del Valle, Escrita por Francisco Lopez de Gomara, clerigo. Anadiose de la nuevo descripcion y traca de todas las Indias, con una Tabla Alphabetica de las materias, y hazanas memorables en ella contenidas. Antwerp: Juan Steelsius [colophon: por Juan Lacio], 1554
Sextodecimo (): A–2Y8; (quire Cc misbound but complete); ff. 349, [11]. Nineteenth-century red morocco, ruled in gilt, marbled endpapers, edges gilt. Wood-engraved arms of Cortés on title. Tissue repair to front hinge, repair to fore-edge margin of title.
One of the most important early chronicles of the Spanish conquest of the New World, López de Gomára’s work is one of the two chief accounts of Cortés’s conquest of Mexico.
He served as Cortés’s secretary and chaplain and made use of his position to gather information relating to the extraordinary exploits surrounding the overthrow of the Aztec empire. “‘The two pillars, on which the story of the Conquest mainly rests’, wrote Prescott, ‘are the Chronicles of Gomara and Bernal Diaz’ . . . Gomara (1510–55) never visited the scene of his master’s glory, but when Cortés returned to Spain in 1540, the young cleric became his private chaplain and secretary . . . Gomara’s resulting Historia . . . is a eulogistic panegyric of his hero, which in consequence sorely galled the other participants of the conquest . . . Yet one cannot deny that, in spite of all its partiality, Gomara’s history is a good history; he derived his information from the highest sources and he wrote with an elegant brevity and sense of arrangement that contrasted favorably with the rambling incoherencies of many of his contemporaries” (Penrose, p. 295).
The work includes a biography of Cortés and accounts of his travels, as well as those of Francisco de Ulloa in 1539 to the Pacific coast of Mexico and Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo in 1542 along the coast of California. The work is particularly noted by Wagner and others for including the earliest mention of California, as well as information about the early history of the present southwest. “Contains the first printed accounts of the Cortés expeditions to California, the expeditions of Francisco Ulloa, Marcos de Niza, Coronado, the subsidiary expeditions resulting from the last, and the voyage of Cabrillo” (Wagner).
This is one of three Antwerp printings of this work issued in 1554. This volume, a variant of the first Antwerp edition, forms the second part of the author’s Historia General de la Indias. The two parts of the Antwerp editions, each with their own titles and without reference to volumes, are rarely found together and believed to have been issued separately, with Wagner and Sabin giving them separate treatment (though European Americana citing them together). The octavo Antwerp editions are essentially the first obtainable, after the exceedingly rare Spanish edition of the same year published in folio in Saragossa. All are scarce.
European Americana 554/32; Medina (BHA) 168; Palau 141143; Sabin 27731; Wagner Spanish Southwest 2i. Boies Penrose, Travel and Discovery in the Renaissance, 1955.
[171516]
£7,600
INCUNABLE EDITION WITH THE WORLD MAP
38. MACROBIUS, Ambrosius Theodosius. In somnium Scipionis expositio ex Ciceronis libro de republica excerptum [with] Saturnalia. Venice: Phillipus Pincius, 29 October 1500
Folio in two parts, ff. xxxvi; lxxxvi, 122 leaves. Contemporary wooden boards. Housed in a green morocco backed box. Woodcut map and diagrams, Roman letter with some Greek characters, spaces for initials. Scattered early marginalia. Leather spine worn, clasps missing, scattered minor worming and minor dampstaining to inner margins, overall in good original condition.
The last incunable edition of the influential text by the fifth-century writer Macrobius. “The works of Macrobius . . . were of great popularity throughout the Middle Ages. His neoplatonic commentary on Cicero includes, among many references to the pseudo-sciences, a geographical concept which is different from that of Ptolemy. The inhabited world north of the equator is balanced by a southern continent divided from it by water” (Shirley).
This printing complete with that woodcut world map figuring a massive antipodal southern continent (fol. XXX). One of the very earliest world maps, this halfpage woodcut depicts a world split into two – Europe and the balancing Antipodes – and surrounded by ocean at the edges. This remarkable image, which survived by manuscript transmission from the fifth century into the age of printing, had a strong and lingering effect on post-Renaissance and pre-discovery geography. Reprints appeared throughout the next century in at least editions of 1521, 1528, 1565 and 1574, as well as additional crude variants.
This splendid Venetian incunable printing was only the fifth or sixth edition of Macrobius to appear in print. The first edition (Venice, 1472) did not include a map; in the subsequent fifteenth-century printings Shirley has identified four varying woodblocks: Brescia, 1483; Venice, 1489 (in another work); Venice, 1492; and Venice, 1500 (the present printing).
Bod-inc M-005; BMC V 499; BSB-Ink M–5; Goff M13; GW M19705; HC 10430*; Oates 2079; Pr 5326; Walsh 2472, 2473; ISTC im00013000. Campbell, Earliest Printed Maps, 90 (reproducing the map) & pp. 114–17; Sander 4075; Shirley 13 (block 4).
[171480] £9,600
39. MANDEVILLE, Jean de. Tractato dele piu maraviliose cose e piu notabile che si trovino in le parte del mondo. Venice: Manfredo Bonelli, 26 January, 1505
Small quarto (152 × 100 mm): A–EE4; 112 leaves, unnumbered. Contemporary Italian sheep, rebacked to style and relined, spine with three raised bands, compartments tooled in blind, covers ruled in blind to a panel design of concentric borders with floral tools. Title within woodcut border, woodcut initial, typographical ornament at end. Contemporary manuscript foliation and note in Italian on verso of last leaf (mostly illegible). Binding professionally refurbished, including repair to front inner hinge and corners, paper repairs to margins of title page and intermittently to margins of contents (slightly touching text on A1 verso, B1, and M1), central portion of final leaf including colophon sometime torn and replaced in excellent facsimile, small marginal dampstains to a couple of gatherings, occasional fingersoiling and small marks. A very good copy.
Rare early Italian edition of one of the first printed travel narratives, taking its reader to the Holy Land, Egypt, Turkey, Persia, Tartary, India, and China. Extremely popular during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Mandeville’s adventures set the stage for all European accounts of encounters with the east’s great civilizations.
All early editions, especially those in vernacular languages, are rare both institutionally and in commerce. No copies of this edition are traced in auction records, and an online institutional search returns four locations.
This copy is in a charming contemporary Italian binding. The style of the blindstamped decoration on the covers points to a northern Italian workshop. The arrangement of the concentric borders incorporating palmette tools echoes bindings produced in the Veneto region or in Venice in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries (e.g. BCABo, 16.K.III.1, held in the Biblioteca dell’Archiginnasio in Bologna).
The Voyages de Jehan de Mandeville chevalier, which appeared in manuscript in France c.1357, purports to be the personal account of Sir John Mandeville, born in St. Albans, who left England in 1322 and travelled the world, serving the sultan of Cairo and visiting the Great Khan, and finally in 1357, while ill, setting down his discoveries. It covers his travels to the Middle East and Palestine, before he continues to India, Tibet, China, Java, and Sumatra, and then returning westward via Arabia, Egypt, and North Africa.
The majority was assembled from other manuscript sources. Parts of the narrative, including that extending from Trebizond to Hormuz, recognisably depends on Odoric of Pordenone (1330; first published 1513). Though Mandeville’s framework of narration is fictitious, the substance is not. Without doubt, the author earnestly reported what his authorities recorded.
The text was printed in Latin in 1483. The first Italian edition was published in Milan in 1480, followed by 12 more incunable editions and 10 editions in the 1500s, all printed before 1567. Subsequently, the Italian text did not appear again separately in print until Zambrini’s 1870 edition. The late fifteenth-century popularity of the Italian editions is striking “when we remember that not only was Columbus himself an Italian, but that north Italy was at that time the main centre of discussion of the western and eastern voyages. Mandeville’s information on Cathay was of importance to Columbus and probably Toscanelli before him; Cabot, Vespucci, and Behain all had connections with north Italy . . . the decline of Italian maritime and commercial supremacy in the mid sixteenth century exactly coincides with the cessation of [Italian] editions” (Moseley, p. 132).
“This record of enthusiasm for Mandeville in the early days of printing is significant because these were also the early days of exploration and discovery . . . [the book] helped to create a demand for a route to China and the Indies, and so served as both imaginative preparation and motive force for the explorations and discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Even after the discovery of America, it continued to play a part in quickening the imaginations both of those who risked their fortunes and of the more humble sailors who risked their lives in looking for the wealth and wonders of the East in the new world in the West” (Bennett, pp. 231–6).
Bennet, Italian, 16; EDIT16 CNCE 72583. Josephine Waters Bennett, The Rediscovery of Sir John Mandeville, 1954; Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. I, book 1, 1994; C. W. R. D. Moseley, “The availability of Mandeville’s Travels in England, 1356–1750”, The Library, vol. XXX, no. 2, 1975.
[171562] £24,000
40. MANDEVILLE, Jean de. Qual tratta delle piu maravegliose cose e piu notabile che si trovino: e come presentialmente ha cercato tutte le parte habitabile del mondo: & ha notato alcune degne cose che ha vedute in esse parte. Venice: Alvise di Torti, August 1534
Small octavo (149 × 99 mm): I8 A–P8; 127 (of 128) leaves, lacking final blank, ff. [viii], 119. Early nineteenth-century red half morocco by Vogel (likely the Parisian E. Vogel), spine with gilt-dotted raised bands, compartments tooled in blind and in gilt, marbled sides and endpapers, blue silk bookmarker. Title within elaborate woodcut border. Title page with contemporary ownership inscription “Ex libris Petri Diazzi” (“From the library of Petrus Diaz”) and partially removed later circular library stamp (mostly illegible) on lower outer corner, small loss and burnt mark at foot of leaf A1 also apparently from ownership stamp removal. Spine faded, couple of minor bumps and spots of rubbing at extremities, contents uniformly lightly browned, paper repairs to margins of title page affecting woodcut border in a couple of places, other marginal repairs to leaves A4–B1, C1–2, C8, and P1, small wax drops on leaves L4 and N7, occasional faint marks or small stains. A very good copy.
Rare early Italian edition. All early editions, especially those in vernacular languages, are rare both institutionally and in commerce. Other than the present, we have traced only two other copies of this edition at auction, the most recent one being fifty-six years ago. An online institutional search returns fourteen locations.
Bennet, Italian, 21; EDIT16 CNCE 60346. Josephine Waters Bennett, The Rediscovery of Sir John Mandeville, 1954; Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. I, book 1, 1994; C. W. R. D. Moseley, “The availability of Mandeville’s Travels in England, 1356–1750”, The Library, vol. XXX, no. 2, 1975.
[171585]
£14,800
THE LAST EARLY ITALIAN EDITION
41. MANDEVILLE, Jean de. Nel quale si contengono di molte cose maravigliose. Con la tavola di tutti i capitoli, che nella presente opera si contengono. Novamente stampato, & ricorretto. Venice: [Battista Mammello], 1567
Small octavo (149 × 97 mm): A–N8 O2; ff. 106. Near-contemporary limp vellum, yapp edges, evidence of ties, relined, endpapers renewed. Woodcut oval portrait of Julius Caesar on title page, woodcut initial. Foot of title trimmed removing early ownership inscription, residues of later removed paper labels on front pastedown and front free endpaper verso. Early manicula on p. 66. Vellum a little soiled and marked, inner hinge cracked, first gathering slightly loose with title page partly detached from gutter, delicate but holding, title page and following two leaves with small chip in outer margin and couple of wormholes (affecting a few letters), faint damp stain to lower margin of gatherings F–I and L to the end, a few small marks, otherwise generally clean. A very good copy.
The last Italian edition printed in the sixteenth century; the Italian text did not appear again separately in print until Zambrini’s 1870 edition. We trace only two copies in auction records, the most recent one being sixty years ago. An online institutional search returns twenty-one locations.
Bennet, Italian, 24; EDIT16 CNCE 60995. Josephine Waters Bennett, The Rediscovery of Sir John Mandeville, 1954; Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. I, book 1, 1994; C. W. R. D. Moseley, “The availability of Mandeville’s Travels in England, 1356–1750”, The Library, vol. XXX, no. 2, 1975.
[171527] £12,000
ENGLISH CHAPBOOK
42. MANDEVILLE, Jean de.
The Voyages and Travels of Sir John Mandevile, Knight: wherein is set down the Way to the Holy Land, and to Hierusalem: As also to the lands of the Great Caan, and of Prestor John; to India, and divers other countries: Together with many and strange Marvels therein. London: Printed for R. Chiswell, B. Walford, M. Wotton and G. Conyers, 1704
Quarto (176 × 137 mm): A–R4 S2; pp. 135, [5]. Modern quarter mottled calf, spine with raised bands, compartments framed in gilt, red morocco label, vellum corners, mar bled paper sides, edges red. Title page with 2 woodcuts of ships, 69 similar illustrations in text (some repeated). Contents lightly browned and foxed, title page rubbed and marked and with couple of small paper res idues in margin, corner of first five leaves and last leaf chipped just touching lettering, lower margin of contents shaved occasional ly touching words or woodcuts (with loss of approx. 1.5 lines of text on last leaf), part of four lines of text on p. 5 not printed (appar ently due to a workshop’s accident) and sub sequently added in contemporary manuscript, small hole on leaf K (perhaps an attempt at censoring woodcut), a couple of wax stains, occasional marks. A very good copy.
Rare English edition, profusely illustrated. No copies of this edition are traced in auction records; an online institutional search returns five locations. The first edition in English was printed by Richard Pynson in 1496, without illustrations. This was followed by Wynkyn de Worde’s edition, in 1499, illustrated with a collection of woodcuts copied from Anton Sorg’s German editions of 1478 and 1481. Worde’s woodcuts were then followed and reworked by subsequent English printers well into the eighteenth century, including the printers of this edition.
Bennett, English, 18; ESTC N63242. See: Josephine Waters Bennett, “The Woodcut Illustrations in the English Editions of ‘Mandeville’s Travels’”, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 47, 1953, pp. 59–69.
[171528] £4,600
A GIFT FROM THE EDITOR
43. MANDEVILLE, Jean de. The Voiage and Travaile of Sir John Maundevile, Kt. Which treateth of the Way to Hierusalem; and of Marvayles of Inde, with other Ilands and Countryes. Now publish’d entire from an Original MS. in the Cotton Library. London: Printed [by William Bowyer] for J. Woodman, D. Lyon and C. Davis, 1725
Octavo (229 × 139 mm), pp. xvi, [8], 384, [8]. Contemporary mottled calf, skilfully rebacked with russia in the early nineteenth century, spine with raised bands, compartments ruled and decorated in gilt, black morocco label, date in gilt at foot, covers and board edges framed in gilt, edges sprinkled red. Woodcut initials, head- and tailpieces. Title page printed in black only (a variant is printed in red and black). Extremities rubbed, corners worn, a little superficial erosion to sides from the mottling, front inner hinge superficially split, but firm, lower half of initial blank detached from gutter, foxing to initial, final gathering, and a couple of internal leaves, sporadic minor mark, but generally bright and clean. A very good, wide-margined copy.
First complete edition in English, the first to be printed from the Cotton library manuscript in the British Museum, the now-standard English text. Previous English editions were based on a manuscript with several lacunae, omitting parts of Mandeville’s journey into Egypt. Bowyer’s records show a print run of 350 copies.
The beginning of the eighteenth century saw a rebirth in Mandeville’s popularity. In the preface here, he is presented as an important English writer and historian, “recuperated as a national figure . . . The edition had an apparatus obviously meant to place Mandeville beyond the realms of the cheap quartos in which for decades his text had been reproduced and to confer on the retrieved author a new dignity” (Matthews, p. 173). The idea that Mandeville was a real author was soon dismissed once more, but the text had now entered the canon of Middle-English literature.
This copy was gifted by the anonymous editor to Lewis Buckeridge (before 1728–1760), a student of Trinity College, Cambridge. Buckeridge inscribed his name on the title page and recorded the gift on the front pastedown with the Latin inscription “Donum amicissimi editoris” (“a gift of my dearest friend the editor”); the inscription is dated Trinity College 1745 and accompanied by a small drawing of the Buckeridge family’s coat of arms. The identity of the editor, whose name does not appear in the book, is an object of scholarly debate. Wellek (p. 220) and Watson (p. 44) suggest they were David Caskey (without providing any further details). In this copy, at the end of the “editor’s preface”, the initials “D.C.” are added in manuscript, presumably by Buckeridge, supporting the view of Wellek and Watson.
Provenance: John Jeffreys Pratt (1759–1840), 2nd Earl and 1st Marquess of Camden, with his armorial bookplate on the front pastedown. The long bibliographical annotation on an initial blank, mentioning the London edition of 1568 and De Worde’s illustrated edition of 1503, might be in his hand.
Bennett, English, 22; ESTC T100822; Howgego I M39. David Matthews, “The Further Travels of Sir John: Mandeville, Chaucer, and the Canon of Middle English”, in Geraldine Barnes & Gabrielle Singleton, eds, Travel and Travellers from Bede to Dampier, 2008; Keith Maslen & John Lancaster, eds, The Bowyer Ledgers, 1991, no. 1096; George Watson, The Concise Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, 1966; Rene Wellek, The Rise of English Literary History, 1941.
[171565]
£3,600
44. MANDEVILLE, Jean de: The Voiage and Travaile … London: Printed for J. Woodman, D. Lyon and C. Davis, [by William Bowyer] 1727
Octavo (227 × 140 mm), pp. xvi, [8], 384, [8]. Late nineteenth-century morocco-grain roan, smooth spine divided by gilt fillets and lettered in gilt, covers and board edges ruled in gilt, marbled endpapers, edges gilt. Title page printed in red and black, woodcut initials, head- and tailpieces. Contemporary ownership inscription “James Clarke” at head of title page, later annotation on verso of rear blank. Extremities rubbed with occasional spots of wear, sometime retouched with colour in places, joint ends cracked and inner hinges superficially split, but firm, contents uniformly slightly toned, couple of light marks on title page, intermittent faint damp stains and foxing in margins, otherwise clean. A very good, well-margined copy.
First edition, reissue with a cancel title page dated 1727 (see previous item). Bowyer’s records show a print run of 300 copies.
Bennett, English, 23; ESTC T100821; Howgego I M39. David Matthews, “The Further Travels of Sir John: Mandeville, Chaucer, and the Canon of Middle English”, in Geraldine Barnes & Gabrielle Singleton, eds, Travel and Travellers from Bede to Dampier, 2008; Keith Maslen and John Lancaster, eds, The Bowyer Ledgers, 1991, no. 1281; George Watson, The Concise Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, 1966; Rene Wellek, The Rise of English Literary History, 1941.
[171566]
£2,600
MANDEVILLE, Jean de. The Travels and Voyages of Sir John Mandevile, Knt. Containing an Exact Description of the Way to Hierusalem Great Caan; India, the Country o Preston-John [sic], and many other Eastern Countries: With an Account of many strange Monsters, and whatever is curious and Remarkable therein. Faithfully collected from the Original Manuscript, and illustrated with Variety of Pictures. London: Printed for J. Hodges and J. Harris, [c.1745–50]
Duodecimo (145 × 183 mm): A–F12 (including frontispiece as A1), 74 leaves, pp. 138, [6]. Early nineteenth-century calf, neatly rebacked to style, smooth spine divided by gilt fillets, red morocco label, double gilt fillet frame to covers, board edges tooled in gilt. Woodcut frontispiece, 12 woodcuts in text (one repeated twice), woodcut ornament on title, initials, head- and tailpieces. Corners repaired, occasional light wear at extremities, covers a little scuffed, inner hinges repaired, contents evenly lightly browned, short closed tear at foot of leaf A5 just touching signature, repair in margin of leaf E8, corners of a couple of pages chipped (not affecting text), contents generally clean. A very good copy.
Rare English chapbook edition. No copies of this edition are traced in auction records; an online institutional search returns three locations. This edition features a woodcut frontispiece depicting a ship, a classic motif which in earlier edition often appears as a vignette on the title pages. The other woodcuts are close imitations of those appearing in the 1722 edition printed by Wilde and Norris.
Bennett dates this edition between around 1745 and 1750: “J. Harris is supposed to have been an apprentice of J. Newberry of Reading, who went to London after 1744 . . . on the fly-leaf of the Columbia Univ. copy, in a boyish hand, is written, ‘Robert Markes His Book 1756’. The ‘56’ has been inked over a ‘49’” (Bennett 1954, p. 69).
Provenance: William Francis Hunter of Barjarg, with his ownership inscription on the front pastedown, p. 7, and 47. The style of the handwriting suggests a date around the mid-nineteenth-century, indicating this was likely William Francis Hunter-Arundell, 4th esquire of Barjarg (1820–1889), rather than his father of the same name (1785–1827).
Bennett, English, 25; ESTC T100823. Josephine Waters Bennett, The Rediscovery of Sir John Mandeville, 1954; Josephine Waters Bennett, “The Woodcut Illustrations in the English Editions of ‘Mandeville’s Travels’”, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 47, 1953, pp. 59–69.
[171526] £1,800
IN THE LANGUAGE OF ITS EARLIEST APPEARANCE IN PRINT
46. MANDEVILLE, Jean de. De Wonderlyke Reize van Jan Mandevyl. Beschryvende eerst de Reize en Geschiedenisze van den H. Lande van Beloften, te Voet, te Paard of ter Zee, ende de Gestaltenisze, ende de Gelegendheid van den zelven Landen. Daar na de Gestaltenisze ende Zeden van de Landen van Egipten, Syrien, beide Arabien, Persien, Indien ende Ethiopien, ende ook dat Leeven ende Geloove der Menschen van dien Landen. Amsterdam: Abraham Cornelis, [c.1750]
Quarto (192 × 149 mm): A–K4; 40 leaves, pp. 78, [2]. Mod ern light blue wrappers, smooth spine lettered in manu script. Woodcut vignette on title page. Minor rubbing at extremities, contents evenly slightly browned, a little foxing to title page and last leaf, paper flaws in lower margin of leaves K3–4 causing couple of small holes (without loss of text). A very good, clean copy.
The first appearance of Mandeville’s Itinerarius in print was in a Dutch vernacular translation dated to around 1470 (according to Bennett) or around 1477 (according to STCN). This edition was followed shortly after by others in German, French, Italian, Latin, and more vernacular languages. Mandeville’s book had a spectacular success in the Netherlands, where travel literature was - since the Middle Ages - one of the most widely read genres. In the early modern period, it was one of the favourite vernacular texts alongside Polo’s Milione, and other medieval narratives such as the Itinerarius of Jean Voet and the Voyage of Master Joos van Ghistele. It was constantly reprinted, with sixteen editions published by the close of the seventeenth century. Later editions like this one show that the Dutch interest in Mandeville’s discoveries never diminished, and their low survival rate is an indication of their popularity with contemporary readers. We traced one copy of this edition in auction records; an online institutional search returns five locations.
This edition has a printed imprimatur at the end by the court of Brussels is dated to October 1550. The original 1550 edition was later reproduced by various printers (firstly in the sixteenth century, then in 1734). The present edition matches STCN 183625781, dated to the second half of the eighteenth century and corresponding to Bennett 19 (c. 1750).
Provenance: Prof. Dr. Willy L. Braekman (1931–2006), a Belgian professor, collector, bibliophile, and author of books on Dutch history and folklore, with his bookplate on the front pastedown.
Bennett, Dutch, 19; STCN 183625781. Josephine Waters Bennett, The Rediscovery of Sir John Mandeville, 1954.
[171586] £800
A RARE SNAPSHOT OF SIXTEENTH-CENTURY POPULAR SPOKEN LANGUAGE
47. MANUSCRIPT DICTIONARY. Spanish-Italian manuscript dictionary. [Italy, possibly Naples, c.1530–1550]
Manuscript on paper (280 × 105 mm): i20 ii22 iii7 (of 10 leaves, 3 cancelled after iii4); 49 leaves, unnumbered. Written in brown ink in a few different sixteenth-century Italian cursive hands, with corrections and additions throughout. Contemporary tacketed stationery binding, attached to spine with two sets of three threads sewn through two vellum overbands, fore-edge flap extending from back cover. Housed in a custom red cloth solander box by Gaylord Bros, NY. Initial “B” in contemporary manuscript on front cover between two ropework designs. Some soiling and natural creasing to vellum, one thread partially detached, small hole to front cover and first three leaves, light damp stain to lower margin of contents, occasional small marks, else generally clean. A well-preserved example.
A rare example of Renaissance popular lexicographical production, comprising two sequences of an alphabetical Spanish-Italian wordlist. Compiled by an early Italian owner for his own use, the book is in a charming tall and narrow wallet-style binding, no doubt intended for carrying in a pocket.
The vocabulary starts on leaf 6 and continues until the end, encompassing two different wordlists separated by a few blanks (ff. 35r–39r). The words are sorted alphabetically by the first two or three letters and arranged in two double columns per page (in all four columns, as each Spanish word has its Italian counterpart or a short definition to the right). The numerous changes of ink colour suggest the words were added progressively across a period of time. The choice of words does
not denote a particular purpose or technical slant, the wordlist being a collection of useful everyday terms. They encompass subjects such as food, body parts, members of the family, all sorts of objects, and useful verbs.
The first Spanish-Italian bilingual vocabulary, Vocabulario de las dos lenguas Toscana y Castellana, appeared in print in 1570, edited by Cristóbal de Las Casas. Before then, merchants, bankers or administrators compiled their own personalized manuscript wordlists in notebooks such as this.
The first five leaves of the manuscript feature a series of unrelated texts: (f. 1r) a record of two payments dated ?1510 (date only partially legible); (ff. 1–1v) a few brief excerpts from Paolo Giovio’s Historiarum sui temporis libri XLV; (f. 2v) an Italian madrigal (two stanzas of eight verses each), in a different hand. The text, by Filippo de Monte, begins “Aure ch’el tristo a lamentavol’ suono … / … Vedeste voi gia mai simil dolore”; (ff. 3–5v) a series of brief notes or praises addressed to famous people, including a Cardinal de Medici (perhaps Cardinal Ferdinando de Medici), Giovanni Battista Grimaldi, a Bishop of Brescia, G. F. Bini, Giuseppe Cincio, and others. This section ends with with a passage on virtue: “La virtu insegna a fugire l’otio il quali ofendi il dio…” (fol. 5v). Each praise or excerpt dedicated to a specific person is followed by a reference such as “fa. 54”, “fa. 70”, “fa. 74” etc., suggesting these are quoted from a common but still unidentified source.
The characteristics of the handwriting and the added excerpts in Italian point to an Italian origin for this manuscript and a dating to the sixteenth century. This is corroborated by the presence of a common sixteenth-century Italian watermark on the paper, showing a mermaid with two tales, similar to Briquet 13891 (Rome, 1531–9) and 13889 (Naples, 1524–8).
A southern Italian, possibly Neapolitan, provenance seems plausible. A Spanish-Italian vocabulary would have been especially useful in sixteenth-century Campania, as Naples was placed under Spanish rule, the Kingdom of Naples being united to the Kingdom of Sicily from 1503 to 1707. Naples was ruled through viceroys appointed by the King of Spain; the word “viceroy” is included in the present vocabulary (Visorei / Vice re. Vis reies / Vici re, fol. 34).
A further in-depth dialectical study of the words is necessary to determine whether the manuscript was effectively compiled for the use of a Ligurian or Tuscan resident in Naples who needed basic Spanish vocabulary to communicate with the established Spanish viceroys and inhabitants. A few words appear to be of Neapolitan origin, such as “zibetto” (fol. 40), “sbafutta” (fol. 41), “mazzette” (fol. 43). However, many of the Italian translations are Tuscan and could very well be the language of a Ligurian or Tuscan based in Naples. Many merchants, bankers (especially the Genovese), and dignitaries converged on Naples during Spanish rule. [171533]
£28,000
SCARCE MEDICINE SAMMELBAND
48. MEDICINE - OTTATO, Cesare, and others. [Sammelband of medical works, including some of the earliest treatises on syphilis]. Venice: 1516–19
Three works in one vol., folio. Eighteenth-century calf, vellum lettering pieces, repairs to spine. Provenance: A. E. Gymasium Kromerizense Bibliotheca Maior (inked stamp on fol. 55r of second work). Early manuscript annotations in Latin of medical interest (observations on different pathologies of the human body) on front endpapers.
A rich Sammelband of humanist medical texts which found its place in the Parsons Collection chiefly for the work bound third here, a collection of treatises, including three by Sebastian Aquilani, Nicholas Leoniceno, and Juan Almenar on syphilis. Then known as “morbus gallicus” (the French disease), after the epidemic among the soldiers of Charles VIII of France when he invaded Naples in the first of the Italian Wars, syphilis is now known to have been a venereal disease introduced by Columbus from America.
Medical knowledge in the Renaissance was still based on a corpus of ancient and medieval authors, here primarily the Greek physician Galen of Pergamum and the Islamic Golden Age physician Rhazes (Abu Bakr al-Razi).
The first work in the volume is an astrological and medical treatise by Cesare
Ottato of Naples, one of the contemporary scholars reviving interest in Galen with fresh commentaries and Latin translations. At the University of Pisa, he was a colleague of Lorenzo Lorenzi, who wrote the first humanist Latin translation of Galen’s Commentary on Aphorisms to be printed.
The ninth book of Rhazes’s Liber ad Almansorem, commonly known as Almansor, was a popular university textbook. The second work, first published in 1480, is a commentary on Almansor by Arcolani, who was professor of medicine and surgery at Bologna and later at Padua. Arcolani’s book is of interest in the history of dentistry because it contains the first description of the use of gold leaf in filling teeth; there are also several chapters on diseases of the teeth.
The third book opens with the commentary on Almansor of Marco Gatinara (Gattinara) (ca. 1442-1496), an Arabist physician who taught the practice of Rhazes at the faculty of Pavia. He is credited with the invention of the syringe, of which he first made wooden and then metal models. This is followed by two treatises on fever by Astari Biagio and Cesare Landolfi, both also active at Pavia in the fifteenth century, and then the three treatises on syphilis.
i) Ottato, Cesare. Opus tripartitum de crisi, De diebus criticis: & de causis criticorum. Venice: heirs of Octaviano Scoto, 1517. Text in two columns. Aa–Bb6; 12 leaves. Woodcut diagrams. First leaf mounted. Early manuscript annotations. Durling 3425.
ii) Arcolano, Giovanni. Practica. Eminentissimum opus in nonum Rasis. Venice: Lucantonio Giunta, 1519. A–Y8; 177 leaves. Text in two columns. Contemporary annotations. Durling 248 (1517 edition).
iii) Gatinara, Marco, and others. Super nono Almansoris: Blasij Astarij de febribus. Cesaris Landulphi de febribus. Sebastiani Aquilani de morbo gallico. Eiusdem questio de febre sanguinis. Nicolai Leoniceni de morbo gallico ... Antonij Benivenij de morborum mirandis. Joannis Almenar de morbo gallico ... Joannis Almenar De morbo Gallico. Venice: heirs of Octaviano Scoto, 1516. A–N6; ff. 79, [1]. First and last leaves mounted. Contemporary annotations. Wellcome 2699; Durling 2015.
[171640]
£10,000
FIRST ITALIAN EDITION OF A LANDMARK SPANISH WORK ON NAVIGATION, TRANSLATED BY AN EYEWITNESS TO THE SPANISH CONQUEST
MEDINA, Pedro de. L’arte del navegar, in laqual si contengono le regole, dechiarationi, secreti, & avisi, alla bona navegation necessarii. Venice: Gianbattista Pedrazano, 1555
Small quarto (199 × 148 mm): a8 b4 A–Q8 R10; 149 leaves (of 150, lacking final blank), ff. [12], cxxxvii (some errors in foliation). Old stiff vellum, rebacked in lighter vellum, manuscript spine title, title also written in ink on front board. Numerous woodcut diagrams and illustrations in the text, full-page map of the New World on leaf E1. Nineteenth-century ownership inscription on front pastedown (noting an 1887 purchase of the book from Quaritch), with William L. Clements Library bookplate below (stamped withdrawn). Vellum darkened and stained, edges worn. Shaved a bit close at head though well clear of running header. Light tanning and soiling, pen trials to margins throughout. A very good copy.
First Italian edition of one of the most important navigational treatises of the Renaissance; second issue, with the date on the title page changed from 1554 to 1555 (the colophon still reads 1554).
Medina’s work, first published in Spanish in Valladolid in 1545, was the first practical treatise on navigation. Forming a like pair with Martin Cortes’s Breve Compendio de la Sphera y de la Arte de Navegar, this is the earliest work to give reliable information on the navigation of American waters, as Medina - said to have been one of Hernan Cortes’s captains - based his information on the firsthand experiences of pilots and masters of the ships using the West Indies trade route. It was the earliest translations of this work, the first French edition of 1554 swiftly followed by the first issue of the present edition, which enabled the rest of Europe to challenge Spanish hegemony of the seas. It became a popular standard text in the sixteenth century and was soon translated into English and Dutch.
The map of the Atlantic and adjacent coastal regions, titled “Mundo Novo”, is a faithful reproduction of the map from the first edition and depicts the North American coastline from Labrador all the way south to Brazil and Peru, labelling Florida and several islands of the West Indies, as well as the Mississippi River (R. Spi. San.), Mexico, and various locales in South America. The right side of the map shows Europe and Africa across the Atlantic.
Adams M1025; Church 98; European Americana 555/39; Palau 159679; Sabin 47346.
[171475] £12,000
EARLY SCHOLARLY EDITION OF MELA’S FUNDAMENTAL GEOGRAPHY
50. MELA, Pomponius. De orbis situ libri tres accuratissime emendati, una cum commentariis Joachimi Vadiani Helvitii castigatioribus, & multis in locis auctioribus factis … Paris: C. Wechel, 1530
Small folio (312 × 206): [alpha]8 [beta]6 A4 B–X6 Y4; 142 leaves, pp. [28], 196, [60]. Later quarter calf, marbled boards, raised bands, leather label. Two elaborate biblical woodcut title compartments by Hans Franck, inhabited woodcut initials throughout, text in Latin and Greek type. Ownership inscriptions of Thomas Sandye dated 1608 and W. Parker [?] dated 1610 on both titlepages. Spine rubbed and worn at ends, light shelf wear, repaired holes to verso of first titlepage (with loss of a few words), minor worming to outer margin of gatherings C and D with old repairs, lower margin of p. 127 excised removing catchword but without other loss of text, final blank Y4 renewed with original printer’s device mounted, minor foxing and soiling. A very good copy.
The first Paris printing of Pomponius Mela’s foundational treatise on geography, printed in an attractive folio edition and featuring the extensive commentary of Joachim Vadianus, which first appeared in full in the 1522 Basel edition.
De Situ Orbis was written by Mela, a native of Roman Spain, sometime around the year 43, and represents the only surviving geographical treatise of classical antiquity. The rediscovery and publication of this work, which served as a primary source for Pliny, was of the key factors in the revival of geographical study in the Renaissance and did much to spur interest in world exploration.
The 1522 Basel edition which served as the basis for this first Paris printing also represents the first extensive scholarly treatment of Mela’s geography – Vadianus’ commentary turns a critical eye on the classical work, correcting the ancient author’s mistakes with updated knowledge and arguing in favor of new research and study. He notably also elects to use the name “America” when discussing recent discoveries, which he considers as evidence that Mela was mistaken in his description of the inhabitable zones of the world. This work was printed and issued without a map, though various separately printed maps are found inserted into some copies.
An early scholarly edition of one of the chief texts of classical geography, and a key work in enabling the age of discovery.
Provenance: a) John Elbridge Hudson (d. 1900), Harvard graduate, member of many scientific and scholarly societies (including the American Antiquarian Society), and second president of AT&T, holding that position from 1889 until his death. His library was acquired by the Harvard University Library after his death. b) Harvard University Library, with their faint blind stamp on the first title page and on the first leaf of text, and with their ink stamp and deaccession stamp on verso.
This edition not in Adams. European Americana 530/30; Harrisse (BAV) 157; JCB (3)I:102; Sabin 63958. [171543]
EXPLORATION
51. MELA, Pomponius; BARBARO, Ermolao (ed.). Cosmographus de situ orbis. Venice: Johannes Baptista Sessa, 1501
Small quarto (196 × 133 mm): A–H4; ff. 32. Later marbled paper boards. Woodcut printer’s device on title page and variant on colophon, woodcut initials. Stain at foot of first two leaves, title page a little dusty, else clean and fresh, a very good copy.
A post-incunable edition of Ermolao Barbaro’s revision of Mela’s De Situ Orbis (see previous item). Ermolao Barbaro the Younger (b. 1454–d. 1493) was a widely respected Venetian humanist scholar best known for his commentaries on Aristotle. This is the third edition of his revision, first published in 1494 and dedicated to Pope Alexander VI.
Ebert 13608; Graesse V, 401; Schweiger II.2, 606. Not in Adams or BM-STC Italian.
[171514]
£5,200
ATTRACTIVE ANNOTATED FACSIMILE OF A SIXTEENTHCENTURY MEXICAN MANUSCRIPT
52. MEXICO. Mexican Picture-Chronicle of Cempoallan and Other States of the Empire of Aculhuacan Written on 16 Leaves (31 pp.) of Paper Manufactured from the Maguey-Fibre; About 1530. London: Bernard Quaritch, 1890 Quarto (282 × 206 mm). Contemporary quarter red straight-grain morocco and cloth, spine gilt. Original wrappers bound in. With 31 colour tinted plates. Spine rubbed, chipped at both ends, light shelf wear, front hinge cracked, front free endpaper detached, lightly tanned, otherwise internally clean. A very good copy.
A scarce and attractive facsimile of a sixteenth-century illustrated Mexican manuscript of Tezcucan origin, formerly in the collection of Brasseur de Bourbourg; Part IV of Quaritch’s series “Facsimiles of Choice Examples Selected from Illuminated Manuscripts, Unpublished Drawings and Illustrated Books of Early Date”.
After a brief but detailed historical introduction, the volume comprises colour facsimile plates of the thirty-one-page manuscript itself, with captions identifying the figures and events depicted. The document comprises a pictorial history of the rise of the city-state of Tetzcoco, a member of the ruling Triple Alliance which included Tenochtitlan and Tlacopan, continuing until the arrival of Cortés.
Provenance: Frederick Starr, an American anthropologist and educator, with his bookplate on the front pastedown. He was professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago for thirty-one years, and studied and collected extensively (both legitimately and on the margins of ethics and legality) in Mexico, Africa, and particularly Japan.
[171657] £400
THE EARLY MODERN WORLD AT WAR
MOCENIGO, Andrea. Bellum Cameracense. Venice: per Bernardinum Venetum de Vitalibus, 1525
Small octavo (157 × 100 mm): a–z8 &4; 188 leaves, unnumbered. Modern limp vellum, yapp edges. Woodcut floriated initial. Early manuscript foliation throughout. Intermittent faint damp-staining to margins, more evident on a few final leaves, ink stain on lower margins of leaves p8–q1, sporadic minor mark, otherwise generally bright and clean. A very good copy.
First edition of this history of the War of the League of Cambrai (1508–16), fought by an alliance of European powers against the Republic of Venice. An important source on early modern global military history, the book describes a “world at war” (q7 recto), including references to America and the Portuguese expansion in India.
The league was formed by Pope Julius II, the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, King Louis XII of France, King Ferdinand II of Aragon, and several Italian city-states. Following Venice’s defeat by the French at Agnadello, a new alliance was formed by the Pope to expel the French from northern Italy. The French eventually won at Marignano in 1515. Mocenigo’s account of the war, one of the earliest, begins with a history of Venice, followed by the author’s critique to Venice’s policy of mainland expansion adopted in the fifteenth century, which ultimately led to the war of the League of Cambrai.
In Book IV, Mocenigo interrupts the narration on Venetian politics to provide some information on the wider historical context: “because at the time the whole world was at war, it seems necessary to briefly describe the places of the world, and what peoples were fighting against each other” (r2 verso). In this excursus, Mocenigo describes the distances between key regions of the world to give the reader a sense of its dimensions. Then, he notes: “The vastness of the world does not seem enough to our kings. We went past the Columns of Hercules with a large Spanish Army in only a few months, initially reaching Hispaniola, then eventually finding a new world . . . where many wars were fought. The king of Portugal sent an army to the Cape of Good Hope . . . and every year he sends people to India to buy gold, silver, and spices, and there the war is still ongoing and it is uncertain weather this trade will continue in the future” (q8 verso - q9 recto).
Adams M1518; European Americana 525/11; EDIT16 CNCE 37975; not in Harrisse or Sabin.
[171628] £1,600
54. MÜNSTER, Sebastian. Erklerug des newen instruments der Sunnen. Nach allen seinen Scheyben und Circkeln. Oppenheim: Jakob Kobel, 1528
Quarto (213 × 151 mm): A–D4; 16 leaves, unnumbered. Later paper boards, bottom margin untrimmed. Woodcut maps and illustrations. Spine slightly toned, faint marks on rear cover, contents generally clean, occasional nick or small chip to margins due to paper flaws, paper restorations to two final leaves, with minor loss of paragraph mark and part of one letter on upper inner corner of D4recto. A very good copy.
Very rare first edition of “the germ of the future ‘Cosmography’ and an important landmark in cartographic history” (Karrow): a booklet by the pioneering German cartographer Sebastian Münster in which, after introducing a versatile new astronomical and surveying instrument, he calls on fellow German cartographers to send him detailed maps of their regions, with precise specifications as to how they should do so.
The fruits of this monumental project - the first accurate cartographic representations of the German-speaking world - were included in Münster’s 1544 Cosmographie. According to Karrow, the preface to the latter work, the most widely read general atlas of the mid-sixteenth century, declares that Münster received and utlilized no less than 120 reports.
The first and larger segment of Münster’s booklet explains the construction and use of his “Instrument of the Suns”, which like many instruments could be used
for horological or surveying purposes. The instrument thus plays a crucial role in Münster’s historic appeal, with which he opens the work’s second segment: after pointing out that current maps of Germany are rife with errors, he calls on no less than a dozen of his country’s leading cartographers and scientists to map their own regions and send the results to Oppenheim. To expedite the project, Münster provides a detailed explanation of the method he has already employed to map Heidelberg and its surrounding environs (for the technical details of the method Münster recommends, see Karrow, 414 ff.).
The work includes two illustrations: a woodcut of the instrument he used, and a full-page woodcut of the resultant map of Heidelberg. This roll-call of names constitutes a veritable “who’s who” of German Reformation-era scientists, including such luminaries as Schöner, Apianus, Glareanus, Huttich, Fries, and Tanstetter. As Karrow suggests, the document’s significance transcends that of regional map-making, and is rightly viewed as a new model for cartographic practice: while map-making, particularly of the transatlantic discoveries, was always to some extent a collaborative or plagiarized endeavor, it was notoriously unsystematic and random: our negligible knowledge of the sources and transmission of the geographical information which went into the Waldseemüller wall-map of the world is a good example. Münster’s method formalized the need for collaboration and taking measurements from multiple points of view and standardized the method for doing so. As such, it heralds the arrival of cartography as a bona fide scientific discipline, beginning with Münster’s own Cosmographie, and culminating in the atlases of Ortelius and Blaeu.
The work saw numerous editions, all rare. This present edition is extremely rare both in American institutions and on the market, with only a single auction record (1978). OCLC: Smithsonian. Later editions owned by Harvard (1529, 2 copies) and Minnesota (1534).
Burmeister 31; Karrow 58/B1.
[171590]
£14,000
55. MÜNSTER, Sebastian. Mappa Europae, Eygentlich für gebildet aussgelegt und beschriebenn. Frankfurt: Christian Egenolph, 1536
Quarto (197 × 150): A–F4; 24 leaves, unnumbered. Modern vellum, spine lettered in manuscript. Woodcut surveying instrument on title (repeated in text showing signs of early handcoloring), 1 full-page woodcut map in text, 22 small cuts of cities, and with 2 double page woodcut maps in the rear (the map of Europe bound in upside down). Minor warping to vellum, contents lightly toned, some damp-staining in margins, short closed tear and a little creasing to bottom margin of D2–3 at gutter, small old paper repairs at head of both double-maps near fold on verso. A very good copy.
Extremely rare first German edition of Sebastian Münster’s first geographical work, and the first to be illustrated with maps, termed by Karrow “the later Cosmographia in microcosm” (Mapmakers, p.16). The present edition contains a single page regional map of Heidelberg, a double-page regional map of Basel, where Münster had recently re-located, and most importantly, a double-page map of Europe.
Part monograph, part practical guide, this understudied work provides an interesting
ture include the innovation of southern or “inverted” geographical orientation previously originated by Waldseemüller and the Nuremberg cartographer Etzlaub; the use of precision instruments like the sundial on the work’s title (with a repeat on the following leaf) to be used in conjunction with the making or reading of maps; and the use of the vulgate, making it intelligible to the widest possible audience. Such pamphlets belong to the rarest category of cartographic literature, especially at this extremely early date.
As Karrow observes, it is in the present work that we find the first appearance of Münster’s version of an “inverted” map of Europe, oriented to the south. This simple innovation had a powerful implication for the history of cartography: it made maps easier for cartographers to draw and travellers to read, since they simply followed the path of the sun with a compass or sundial. This orientation would be canonized in Münster’s editions of Ptolemy and the Cosmographia, and can be considered the first “modern” orientation.
This orientation had a history prior to Münster, but the documentation for it is extremely exiguous, and while Münster did not originate it, he certainly established it as standard working procedure. According to Bagrow, the source for Münster’s map of Europe was a wall map by Martin Waldseemüller, first published in 1511; now lost, like the original of Waldseemüller’s wall map of the world, it survives in a
unique copy in a 1520 reprint. Münster’s text does not cite Waldseemüller by name, but a manuscript school-book of Münster’s preserved in the Bavarian State Library contains no fewer than ten sketches of the Waldseemuller map of 1511, thus establishing the connection to the present map beyond a doubt. (An even earlier southern orientation can be found in the Nuremberg cartographer Erhard Etzlaub’s 1499 map of Rome; see entry 76 by Dániel Margócsy in Prints & the Pursuit of Knowledge.) It is difficult to believe that Münster, the most learned cartographer of the sixteenth century, did not know Etzlaub’s maps, but we find no documentation that he did. While obviously vastly reduced from Waldseemüller’s wall map, the present work offers the earliest acquirable example of this cartographic depiction of Europe oriented to the south.
As Burmeister notes, the work was intended as a popular, vernacular alternative to Münster’s earlier Latin work of 1530, Germaniae descriptio. “The Mappa should thus be understood as a prospectus designed to encourage general interest in cosmography, no more the domain of a limited number of learned people . . . but now aimed at the masses and townsfolk”. Münster promises his lay reader and practical traveller four objectives on the title page to the present work: determining distances between any two European cities, ranging from Lisbon to Vienna; determining the latitude of any city (useful for adjusting sundials, sun compasses, etc.); how to navigate across land or water using a sun compass, and accurately guide oneself to any city; and how to survey a city or countryside, in order to construct one’s own map or chart. As mentioned above, Münster provides his reader with a half-page woodcut of his sun compass (a handy instrument and a cheap alternative to a magnetic model) alongside detailed instruction in its fabrication and use.
The remainder of the booklet is devoted to descriptions of the principal cities and states of Europe, including England, Russia, Turkey, and Central Asia (Tartary). Many cities are accompanied by small woodcut vignettes.
The need for such a vernacular guide by the foremost cartographer of his generation betrays the widening geographical horizons of commercial travel in the early modern period. While the present work was addressed to the most general audience, Münster may have had a more specialized audience in mind as well. In his 1528 description of a sundial (Erklerung des newen Instruments der Sunnen), Münster makes a spirited, highly nationalistic plea to German scholars to send him maps and sketches of German lands to be used in making a general map of the country. (See the translation of this extended passage in Karrow, p. 413.) The pamphlet can thus be seen as an outline of the method he wished them to follow.
OCLC reports just one North American copy of the 1536 Mappa Europae, at the NYPL – lacking both double-page maps at the rear. Two copies of the second edition of 1537 are recorded, at Harvard and Yale – only the latter of which contains the maps. We find no complete example in the auction records within the last half century.
Graesse IV, 622; Hantzsch, pp. 39–41, 75–76, 148 (note 63); VD16 M6677. Woodward, The History of Cartography, p 1211 (illustr.); Karrow 58/P; Bagrow, “Carta Itineraria Europae Martini Ilacomili, 1511”, Imago Mundi XI, pp. 149–50.
[171583] £48,000
56. OLSCHKI, Leo S. Incunabula typographica. A Descriptive Catalogue of the Books Printed in the Fifteenth Century (1460–1500) in the Library of Henry Walters. Baltimore: 1906
Quarto. Original tan calf by C. Tartagli & Figlio of Florence with their wax seal on rear pastedown, raised bands, spine and front board gilt, three raised fleur-de-lis arrows with leather thongs on front and rear boards, untrimmed, top edge gilt. Colour frontispiece, one plate, and numerous facsimiles; title page and portions of text printed in red and black. Modern bookplate on front pastedown. Binding lightly rubbed, very clean internally. A near fine copy.
First edition of this lavish and extensively annotated catalogue of fifteenth-century printed books in the collection of Henry Walters, compiled by the noted bookseller and publisher, Leo Samuele Olschki.
The catalogue, which contains over a thousand entries, features works from more than three hundred distinct typographical workshops in languages that include Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Italian, German, Dutch, and Spanish.
Henry Walters (1848–1931), who succeeded his father as president of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, was a businessman, collector, and founder of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. Olschki (1861–1940) was an Italian publisher and bookseller. Born in Prussia into a family of Jewish printers, he founded his own publishing house in Verona before moving to Venice and Florence.
The present work is finely printed in red and black ink (“typis offcinae Aldinae Florentiae”) and illustrated throughout with facsimiles of texts and woodcuts. It features an elaborate, imitation medieval-style binding signed by C. Targagli and Figlio of Florence. In addition to the 476-page catalogue and addenda by Olschki (in French), contents include a three-page introduction by Walters (in English) as well as a geographical index, chronological index, language index, bibliography, errata, and colophon at rear.
[171671] £300
OSÓRIO, Jerónimo. De rebus Emmanuelis regis Lusitaniae invictissimi virtute et auspicio, annis sex, ac viginti, domi forisque gestis, libri duodecim. Ad Henricum Principem, regis eius F. Cardinalem . . . Adiectus est praeter marginis notationes, locupletissimus rerum & verborum index. Cologne: Heirs of Arnold Birckmann, 1576
Small octavo (145 × 90 mm): †–5†8 6†4 A–3C8 3D4; 448 leaves, ff. [xliv], 374 [= 372], [24]. Nineteenth-century half calf, marbled boards. Woodcut historiated initials, head- and tailpieces. Some minor marginal damp stains and a few repairs to blank margins; title-page and last page backed; top comer of last leaf damaged with some loss of text on 5 lines of index; title page soiled. Provenance: Several early ownership inscriptions (Charles Towneley, Esq.; John Rokebye?) on title; contemporary marginal annotations throughout; collection stamp on verso of title.
Osorio’s history of Portugal during the reign of King Manuel I (1495–1521) is an important chronicle of the golden period of Portuguese exploration, with much on Asia and the New World. The first edition appeared in Lisbon in 1571 and “includes discussion of Brazil & of Tobacco” (European America); this is the second, corrected Cologne edition.
The first Cologne edition of 1574 is particularly important for the lengthy introduction by Jean Matal (ca. 1510–1597), making it “the earliest edn to contain the dedicatory epistle by Joannes Metellus describing Portuguese and Spanish explorations in both East & West Indies” (European America). Some copies (e.g. Boston College) appear to be simple reissues of the original 1574 edition with a cancel title-page but otherwise identical collation. In this issue the text is extensively revised, and a full-page of errata is given on the last page of prefatory material.
Adams O381; Borba de Moraes 638 (note); European Americana 576/33; Palau 206.491; Sabin 57804; VD16 O1357.
[171596]
CATALOGUE OF MANUSCRIPTS ASSEMBLED BY AN IMPORTANT EARLY ENGLISH COLLECTOR
£760
58. PARKER, Matthew. Catalogus librorum manuscriptorum quos collegio corporis Christi et b. Mariae Virginis in academia Cantabrigiensi … Cambridge: J. Archdeacon for J. Woodyer, J. Merrill, et al., 1777
Large quarto (285 × 220 mm), pp. [8], 429, [22]. Contemporary paper covered boards, rebacked in paper, spine lettered in black, untrimmed. Engraved portrait frontispiece. Slightly later manuscript inscriptions in ink to front pastedown and front free endpaper; modern bookplates on front pastedown. Binding rubbed and worn, especially at corners and edges, boards soiled, paper split at joints, hinges reinforced with paper, contents moderately tanned with light to moderate foxing. A very good copy.
First edition of the third printed catalogue of the collection of early manuscripts bequeathed by Matthew Parker to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in 1575:
“For over a century the standard reference to Parker’s collection” (James, p. xiv).
A major figure in the English Reformation, Matthew Parker (1504–75) served as archbishop of Canterbury from 1559 to 1575, during the reign of Elizabeth I. Parker has been described as “England’s first great bibliophile” (de Ricci, p.15) and “the foremost collector of medieval manuscripts in the Elizabethan period” (Graham, p. 322). In 1568, the Privy Council tasked him with collecting and caring for all ancient records and monuments dispersed with the dissolution of the monasteries. In 1575, Parker bequeathed his library to Corpus Christi College “under conditions that are the most precise and protective for any bequest of books made in this period” (Graham, p. 337). His collection of medieval and Anglo-Saxon manuscripts thus became the basis for the library that still bears his name today.
This catalogue was compiled and edited by James Nasmith, a Scotsman and fellow of Corpus Christi College from 1765 to 1776. Nasmith’s catalogue contains 482 entries classified by size and organized from the largest to the smallest volume. His catalogue was preceded by those of William Stanley in 1722 and Thomas James, included in his Ecloga Oxonio-Cantabrigiensis, in 1600.
ESTC T144713. Montague Rhodes James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Corpus Christi College Cambridge, vol. 1, 1912; Seymour de Ricci, English Collectors of Books & Manuscripts (1530–1930) and Their Marks of Ownership, 1930; Timothy Graham, “Matthew Parker’s manuscripts: an Elizabethan Library and its use,” in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, vol. 1, To 1640, ed. Elisabeth Leedham-Green and Teresa Webber, 2006; Bruce Dickins, “The Making of the Parker Library” in Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, Vol. 6, no. 1, 1972, p. 30. On Parker and his library, see also: R.I. Page, Matthew Parker and His Books, 1993; Jennifer Summit, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England, 2008, pp. 101–35; and Jeffrey Todd Knight, Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature, 2013, pp. 38–47.
[171654]
£300
DETAILED COLOR FACSIMILE OF A RARE SIXTEENTHCENTURY MAP
59. PENROSE, Boies. A Link with Magellan. Being a Chart of the East Indies, c. 1522. [Philadelphia: Wm. F. Fell Co.], 1929
Folio. Original quarter blue cloth and brown paper boards, printed paper label on front board. In the original paper-covered box. One double-page facsimile chart. Light general wear to volume and slipcase. A near fine copy.
First edition, number 112 of 150 copies. Noted scholar and collector Boies Penrose argues that a unique manuscript chart in his collection is the work of one of the Spanish survivors of Magellan’s circumnavigation.
The book features a brief history of Magellan’s life and voyage and an index of names written on the map, the full-color facsimile of which forms the centerpiece of this publication.
[171644]
£300
“ALL ITALY IN A FEW MONTHS WAS FULL OF IT” -
RAMUSIO
60. POLO, Marco. Opera stampata novamente delle maravigliose cose del mondo, cominciando da Levante a ponente fin al mezo di. El mondo novo & isole & lochi incogniti & silvestri abondanti e sterili & dove abonda loro & argento & Zoglie & pietre preciose & animali & mostri spaurosi & dove manzano carne humana e i gesti & viver & costumi de quelli paesi cosa certamente molto curiosa de intendere & sapere. Venice: Paolo Danza, 1533
Small octavo (155 × 100 mm): a–g8; 56 leaves, unnumbered. Late 20th-century black morocco, spine with raised bands, compartments tooled in gilt, covers framed in gilt with fleurons at corners and vine leaf tool at centre, board edges ruled in gilt, edges gilt. Housed in a custom black morocco solander box. Woodcut vignette depicting an angel on title page. A few initial and final pages lightly foxed, faint marginal damp stains on leaf f6–7 and g5 to the end, small mark with wax residue on lower corner of leaf b2, contents otherwise generally clean and presenting well. A very good copy.
Very rare early Italian edition of Polo’s classic travel narrative. The Italian vernacular translation proved considerably more influential than the earlier German, its importance perhaps even surpassing that of the Latin: “it is probable that the
Italian text was the most widely read by the Mediterranean navigators and traders whose adventurousness so greatly extended our knowledge of the globe” (PMM).
The Venetian explorer’s tale was first circulated in a Franco-Italian manuscript version, then translated and printed in German (1477 and 1481), Latin (1483/4), and Italian (1496, 1500, and 1508). This is the fourth Italian edition. All early editions are famously rare both in commerce and institutionally: we have traced one copy of the first Italian edition at auction in 1918, followed by only three complete copies of any other pre–1530 edition during the last half century. No copies of this 1533 edition are recorded at auction, and an online institutional search returns 12 locations.
Marco Polo (1254–1324) was born into a prominent Venetian trading family. In 1271, he travelled eastwards with his father and uncle, through Syria, Jerusalem, Turkey, Persia, and India to China. Shortly after his return to Venice in 1295, Polo dictated his adventures to Rustichello da Pisa, an Arthurian romance writer, while both were prisoners in Genoa in 1298.
Polo’s narrative is “the most comprehensive and authoritative account of the East produced before 1550” (Lach, p. 36). Its influence on the thinking of Columbus and on the generation of discovery is well known: Prince Henry the Navigator was familiar with the book, and Columbus’s own copy of the first Latin edition is preserved. Giambattista Ramusio, the famous Renaissance editor of travel literature, claimed that the work attracted so much attention at the close of the sixteenth century that “all Italy in a few months was full of it” (preface to the second volume of Navigationi et viaggi, 1559). From the standpoint of Italian literature, Olschki notes “the universal value of his book, the first text of an Italian author written in the vernacular to pass, in various languages, beyond the confines of its native land” (p. 2).
Despite compiling a careful filiation of manuscript and print editions, Yule & Cordier do not definitively identify the original source of the Italian version. The salient characteristic marking the development of the various Latin and vernacular translations is the division of the numerous brief chapters into three books. The first published German and Latin editions are both divided into three sections, and Yule & Cordier posit that Pipino probably based his 14th-century Latin translation on an Italian-language manuscript that was already so divided. Yule & Cordier explain, however, that the “main portion of the work is in its oldest forms undivided, the chapters running on consecutively to the end” (vol. I, p. 81). This Danza edition, which follows Johannes Baptista Sessa’s first printing, consists of 144 [i.e. 141] successive chapters, suggesting that Sessa’s translator worked from an unidentified early manuscript that lacked the tripartite organization, perhaps one in the Venetian dialect such as the Sloane MSS No. 241 at the British Library (Yule & Cordier Appendix F, no. 6).
Cordier, Sinica 1970; EDIT16 CNCE 58910; Printing and the Mind of Man 39 (1496 Italian ed.). Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. I, book 1, 1965; Leonardo Olschki, Marco Polo’s Asia. An Introduction to His “Description of the World” called “Il Milione”, 1960; Henry Yule & Henri Cordier, The Book of Ser Marco Polo, vols I–II, 1903 (see no. 19, vol. II, p. 561).
[171523] £60,000
THE COLUMBUS LETTER OF THE SOUTH
61. (QUIROS, Pedro Fernandez de.) PURCHAS, Samuel. Relation of the New Discoverie in the South Sea Made by Pedro Fernandez Giros Portugez 1609. With His Petitions to the King, One Englished, Another in Spanish. [Caption title; extracted from:] Hakluytus Posthumus Or Purchas His Pilgrimes. [London: William Stansby for Henrie Fetherstone, 1625]
Folio (335 × 214 mm), 6 leaves, numbered pp. 1421–1432. Modern half calf and marbled boards, spine gilt with raised bands. Woodcut initials. Modern monogram bookplate in the shape of Australia on front pastedown. Minor tanning, small paper flaw in second leaf with loss of a few letters, otherwise internally clean. A near fine copy.
Chapter 10 of Samuel Purchas’ Hakluytus Postumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes, extracted from the 1625 first complete edition, being the chapter devoted to Pedro Fernandez de Quiros’s Eighth Memorial, describing his “discovery” of Terra Australis and its wonders, and petitioning for permission to settle and found a Christian colony there.
The memorial was originally published in Spanish in 1609, the first separate English edition in 1617. This is thus a very early English translation of this most influential work, extracted from one of the great collections of travels in English. Also present in this chapter is the original Spanish text of one of Quiros’s other memorials, describing the route from Peru and the details of the geography and indigenous inhabitants of several of the Solomon Islands.
Quiros (1563–1615), a veteran of expeditions to the Pacific who sailed through Torres Strait without setting foot on the Australian mainland, was nonetheless convinced he had discovered the greatly desired southern continent, and petitioned vigorously for its settlement. After his return to Spain from Australia’s out-
lying islands, Quiros began a long series of memorials to the king expounding the great wealth of the lands he had discovered, asking to be allowed to take another expedition to settle the “continent”. Circulation of the Spanish memorials was restricted, and only the Eighth was translated and published separately outside Spain, becoming as a result the best known and the most influential. All are now very rare, not least because the Spanish administration destroyed copies to prevent them falling into the hands of Spain’s adversaries. Quiros is considered the first great proponent for the exploration of Australia and the Pacific, and his Eighth Memorial was the catalyst for interest in the region for many centuries to come: it has been called the southern hemisphere’s counterpart to the Columbus Letter.
For the 1625 edition of Purchas: Church 401A; European Americana 625/173; Hill 1403; Sabin 66686.
[171556]
£1,600
62. RAVENSTEIN, Ernst Georg. Martin Behaim: His Life and His Globe.
London: George Philip & Son, 1908
Folio. Original quarter cloth and grey paper-covered pictorial boards, spine title stamped in black. In a paper-covered slipcase. With 6 plates, one full-scale colour facsimile (printed on four sheets) and 11 in-text illustrations. Modern bookplate on front pastedown. Light shelf wear, hinges a bit stressed, minor foxing and tanning: a very good copy.
First edition, number 165 of 510 copies, of this definitive and attractively produced biography of Martin Behaim and study of his famous Erdapfel, the oldest surviving terrestrial globe, including a full-scale reproduction of its gore.
Behaim, a mapmaker and native of Nuremberg, moved to Portugal in 1484 and became fast friends with King João II, who knighted him the following year. Many claims have been made in his favour over the centuries, suggesting that he introduced valuable astronomical and navigational tools and techniques to the Portuguese, that he accompanied Diogo Cão on his second journey to Africa, and even that he was somehow responsible for Columbus’s voyage to America.
Ravenstein, of the Royal Geographical Society, debunks most of these claims with this work, discovering through years of painstaking research that “Not a single contemporary Portuguese writer mentions the name of Martin Behain, not even Ruy de Pina or Garcia de Resende, the authors of ‘Chronicas’ of João II, who must have known him personally, if not intimately, if he really was such a persona grata with the King as is claimed on his behalf by all his biographers and members of his own family”. An account of a journey to Africa undertaken by Behaim does appear in the Nuremberg Chronicle, but it appears more likely to have been a trading voyage to Guinea, and its inclusion to relate more to Behaim’s birthplace than his achievements. Behaim’s one contemporary claim to fame is that Antonio Pigafetta, the chronicler of Magellan’s voyage, wrote that the navigator used one of Behaim’s maps as evidence for a strait connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the South Sea, though it is unclear if that choice on the map was based on anything other than intuition.
Regardless, the second part of the work provides a detailed treatment of Behaim’s globe, Erdapfel, which, “whatever its defects, is one of the most valuable and inter-
esting geographical monuments of the age”. Ravenstein includes and translates all of the text found on the globe, analyses the choices made, and also provides a substantial appendix of primary documents. Completed in 1492, Erdapfel represents a crystallization of European geographical thought on the very eve of Columbus’s return. The map does not depict America, of course, and also reproduces many of the misconceptions of the day, including the presence of St. Brendan’s phantom island and a large sea separating Europe from Asia.
In 2023, Erdapfel was added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register. The attractive full-colour “facsimile” of the globe included with this work faithfully reproduces the globe gore at scale, spread over four large, folding sheets.
A valuable and instructive treatment of one of the great monuments of pre-Columbian cartography.
[171673]
INSCRIBED ASSOCIATION COPY
£480
63. REDGRAVE, Gilbert Richard. Erhard Ratdolt and His Work at Venice. London: Printed for the Bibliographical Society at the Chiswick Press, April 1894 Quarto. Original vellum over boards, smooth spine tooled in gilt, front board framed by gilt fillets and stamped in red, untrimmed. With 20 plates, of which one folding and several in colour. With half title. Vellum a bit soiled and bowed, light foxing and tanning, occasional offsetting from plates. A very good copy.
First edition, inscribed by the author on the half title “With kind regards from Gilbert R. Redgrave, May 26th 1894”. The work is a thorough and sumptuously produced biography and bibliography of Erhard Ratdolt, one of the most influential and accomplished printers of incunabula.
Ratdolt was a native of Augsburg, but began his printing career in Venice, where he operated from 1476 to 1486. In 1486 he returned to Augsburg and continued printing into the early sixteenth century. In addition to his elegant typography and design, Ratdolt is remembered particularly for producing the first known type specimen sheet, reproduced in facsimile in the present work. After a biography of the printer, the second half of Redgrave’s book contains an expansive bibliography of Ratdolt’s works, with full collational formulas, contents notes, and even type identifications (made especially useful by the presence of the facsimile type specimen sheet).
Redgrave was an English architect and bibliographer, and became President of the Bibliography Society in 1908. In the world of rare books, he is most remembered for collaborating with A.W. Pollard to edit the STC.
Provenance: John Howell, bookseller and publisher, and A.W. Barten, a Dutch printer and typographer who served many years as President of the School of Graphic Arts in Utrecht, with their bookplates on the front pastedown and endpaper.
[171636]
£400
IMPORTANT EARLY TEXTBOOK AND ENCYCLOPEDIA, COMPLETE WITH BOTH MAPS
64. REISCH, Gregor. Margarita philosophica, rationalis, moralis philosophiae principia, duodecim libris dialogice complectens, olim ab ipso autore recognita: nuper aut ab Orontio Fineo Delphinate castigata & aucta, una cum appendicibus itidem emendatis, & quam plurimis additionibus & figuris, ab eodem insignitis. Quorum omnium copiosus index, versa continetur pagella. Basel: Henricus Petrus, 1535
Thick quarto (209 × 143 mm): a–e8 A–Z8 2a–2z8 2A–2Z8 3A12; 788 leaves, pp. [80], 1498 (i.e. 1488, with errors in pagination as issued), [8]. Contemporary full pigskin, spine with raised bands, manuscript lettering in compartments. Title within elaborate woodcut border, numerous in-text woodcut illustrations, initials, and diagrams, many of them full-page, plus two folding maps and one folding chart. Contemporary ownership inscription on title page, occasional underlining, highlighting, or manicules in the same hand to early chapters. Leather rubbed and worn, some worming especially to spine, bands exposed, slight worming to endpapers and outer leaves, touching title border but no text, light tanning, hole in woodcut image on leaf 2q2 verso, a few small, filled holes to blank margin of 2B5, repaired tear to middle fold of second world map, with minor loss to title, border, and edge of image. A very good copy.
The first revised and improved edition (fifth authorized edition, ninth edition overall) of Reisch’s fundamental and hugely influential encyclopedia, here complete with both of the frequently lacking folding maps. First published in 1503, Margarita Philosophica was a masterwork of medieval knowledge, compiling a vast array of subjects from both ancient and recent authors and illustrating their teachings with hundreds of woodcuts and diagrams.
Gregor Reisch was a Carthusian prior, confessor to Emperor Maximilian I, and rector of the University of Freiburg. He compiled this text in the 1490s and had it published a few years later; it immediately became a great success. His book was used as a textbook in universities across Europe, and saw no fewer than twelve editions, many of them pirated, before the end of the century. This is the first edition with authorized corrections and additions, made by French astronomer and cartographer Oronce Finé. His additions appropriately include a well-illustrated chapter on the construction and use of astrolabes.
Written in the didactic style, the book is organized as a discussion of the seven classical liberal arts: the trivium (logic, rhetoric, and grammar) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy). These are supplemented with five additional books which include natural history, medicine, and moral philosophy. Each book is preceded by a full-page allegorical woodcut, begins with a woodcut initial, and features many woodcut illustrations and diagrams throughout. The work is renowned for these entertaining and instructional woodcuts, which include (among others) the earliest printed depiction of the human eye.
While distinctly classical in its teachings (Anthony Grafton argues that “It reveals no sense that either the world or knowledge about it has changed dramatically since ancient times”, p. 16), Margarita Philosophica does include some up-to-date knowledge, most particularly in the two important world maps, both of which are frequently lacking. The first does not depict the New World at all and connects
Africa to Asia in the typical Ptolemaic style, but is accompanied by a note which brings it into the sixteenth century:
“From all accounts [Margarita Philosophica] was one of the most widely read textbooks for university students . . . The earlier editions of the Margarita contain a Ptolemaic world map. This is a rather crudely-drawn woodcut, decoratively enlivened by twelve individually characterised windheads, of which one - Vulternus - is seen peering through a pair of spectacles. A caption across the traditional spit of land adjoining Africa to Asia acknowledges (in Latin) the disappearance of the classical world concept: ‘Here is not land but sea, in which there are such islands not conceived by Ptolemy’. The text of the book contains no further allusion to this piece of information and it is unclear whether the reference is to the discovery of the sea route to India, or to the finding of the West Indian islands by Columbus, or both” (Shirley).
The second world map is a slightly reduced version of the “‘modern’ world map . . . in an elongated rectangular frame” which first appeared in the 1515 edition (Shirley). This map portrays both North and South America, clearly connected by a strip of land; South America is labeled “Paria seu Prisilia”. The map follows pages 1433–4, which briefly describe the geographic location of the New World.
Adams R337; Brunet IV:1201; Sabin 69130; Shirley 22, 40; VD16 R1041; Wellcome I:5412. J. Ferguson, The Margarita Philosophica of Gregor Reisch, 1929, p. 214; Anthony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts, 1992.
[171558] £28,000
ONE OF THE EARLIEST OBTAINABLE EDITIONS
65. ROME GUIDEBOOK. Mirabilia Romae. [Sant’Orso: Giovanni de Reno, c.1475]
Quarto (195 × 138 mm): [a8]; 8 leaves, un numbered. Mid nineteenth-century green morocco, elaborate gilt and blind floral frames to covers, gilt monogram “AF” and crest of the Duke of Genoa and Prince of Savoy Ferdinan do Alberto di Savoia-Carignano (1822–1855) in center of front and rear covers respective ly, board edges tooled in gilt, pink endpapers, edges gilt. Housed in a custom green cloth solander box. Roman type 97R, 28 lines per page. Watermark: scale in a circle. Profession ally recased and refurbished, including discreet repair at spine ends, one corner, and the gilt retouched, peripheral browning to endpapers from binder’s paste, contents lightly foxed. A very good copy, attractively bound.
A rare incunable edition of the earli est European printed guidebook, a ge ographically arranged inventory of the “unmissable” monuments and sites of Rome. This copy was handsomely bound in green morocco for the library of Prince Ferdinando of Savoy, first duke of Genoa, with his coat of arms and initials in gilt on the covers.
This is one of the earliest known editions. ISTC lists eight editions conjecturally printed in the 1470s, of which all except the edition printed at Treviso by Gerardus de Lisa, de Flandria, 12 April 1475, is without a specified date or place. All are exceedingly rare, and only two of the eight editions have appeared in commerce in modern times. A copy of this edition and a copy of the Treviso edition were lots 282 and 283 in the Kissner sale at Christies London, October 1990, and another copy of this edition was offered at Sotheby’s London in 2011. ISTC counts 13 holding institutions of this edition.
Dubbed by PMM the “Renaissance Baedecker”, Mirabilia Romae (“The marvels of Rome”) was composed about 1140–50 by an anonymous writer – sometimes identified as Benedict, Canon of St. Peter’s – as a guide for the pilgrims to the city. First printed in the early 1470s, it was reprinted multiple times over the following century, and translated into Italian, English, Spanish, and German. The great popularity of this work during the Renaissance illustrates a new awareness of the significance of ancient Roman remains and “was instrumental in preserving some of them. The Memorabilia is a valuable source for our knowledge of what remained and attracted notice in medieval Rome. One of its pleasant side-effects was the
beginning of measures for the ‘protection of ancient monuments’ - such as Trajan’s column - as the Roman authorities realized their importance for tourism” (PMM).
“The author of the Mirabilia concentrates attention on ancient Rome; churches serve only to locate the presumed site of an ancient building or sanctuary. Thus he leads a systematic tour through the ancient city, always focusing on the monuments; their identification from literary references, though important, is secondary. Starting at the Vatican, he lists the obelisk – its globe contains, as [the author] is the first to say, Caesar’s ashes; the two mausolea – one presumed to be a temple of Apollo; and the pigna and its canopy in the atrium. Thence he moves to the Mausoleum of Hadrian and other ancient monuments nearby; across the river to the Mausoleum of Augustus, the Pantheon, and the other temples of the Campus Martius; and as the climax, to the Capitol and its long-lost temples, to the Forum and the Palatine. A tour of ancient monuments . . . terminates the survey” (Krautheimer, p. 199).
This edition is assigned to the printer Giovanni de Reno, active in Sant’Orso (Valle d’Aosta, Italy), on the basis of the type and watermark. The writer of the BMC entry notes: “This edition, like that of De Lisa, Treviso, 12 April, 1475, has at the end a chapter concerning ‘Totilae exasperatio in servos Dei’. The chapter headings are at first printed in capitals, as in De Lisa’s edition, but revert to minuscules on 2b. While it thus appears to be certainly a reprint of De Lisa’s work and while the watermarks link it with Sant’Orso, the 9 (upper case) is throughout set at the medium height characteristic of De Reno’s work in 1473. Probably it is an early production at Sant’Orso, printed with a remainder of old type” (BMC VII 1027).
Provenance: a) Prince Ferdinando Maria Alberto of Savoy (1822–1855), son of the King of Sardinia Carlo Alberto and founder of the Genoa branch of the House of Savoy. He owned a substantial library, mostly focused on military books. In addition to the supralibros, this copy has the prince’s ownership label lettered “Biblioteca di S[ua]. A[ltezza]. R[eale] Il Duca di Genova” and a shelf-label “C. II–32” on the front pastedown; his library stamp (faded) on the rear free endpaper; b) Early 20th-century bookplate of a member of the Asinari di Rossillon family of Bernezzo, likely Giuseppe Mario (1878–1943), marquis of Bernezzo, with his bookplate on the front free endpaper verso; he was army general and first aide-de-camp to King Emanuele II.
BMC VII.1027; Goff Suppl. M591a; GW M23540; ISTC im00590600. Richard Krautheimer, Rome: Profile of a City, 2000.
[171568] £60,000
OLD WORLD MARVELS AND NEW WORLD HORIZONS
66. (ROME GUIDEBOOK.) ALBERTINI, Francesco.
Septem mirabilia orbis et urbis Romae et Florentinae civitatis cum epytaph. pul. Rome: Jacobus Mazochius, 7 February 1510
Small quarto (210 × 155 mm): a–b4; 16 leaves, unnumbered, including terminal blank leaf. Modern crushed morocco, boards ruled in gilt, spine gilt with raised bands, gilt inner dentelles. Title within woodcut architectural border. Later armorial bookplate and modern bookplate to front pastedown; early manuscript foliation (cccxxvii–cccxxxiv), a few later marginal annotations in pencil. Extremities lightly rubbed, contents lightly soiled, light dampstaining to top inner edge. A very good copy.
Rare first edition of this important contribution to the mirabilia genre, describing the seven wonders of the ancient world alongside the marvels of Rome and Florence. The new world is also represented, with an early reference to Amerigo Vespucci’s voyages. The work is rare in commerce; we have traced only two copies at auction in the last fifty years.
With a publication date of February 7, 1510, Septem mirabilia was issued three days after Giacomo Mazzocchi published Albertini’s more common guidebook to ancient and modern Rome, Opusculum de mirabilis novae et veteris urbis Romae. A Florentine priest, Francesco Albertini (ca. 1469–1521) had been commissioned by Cardinal Galleotto delle Rovere, nephew of Pope Julius II, to write the Opusculum, an accurate and up-to-date guide to the city of Rome, as a replacement for the Mirabilia Romae urbis, a guidebook first produced in the 12th century in response to the demand from pilgrims for an historical and artistic itinerary to the city.
Although the shorter of the two guidebooks, Septem mirabilia is larger in scope. The book begins with a list of the various wonders of the ancient world, including Thebes, Babylon, the pyramids of Egypt, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. The wonders of Rome follow, including the Aqueduct of Claudius, the Baths of Diocletian, the Forum of Nerva, the Pantheon, the Colosseum, Hadrian’s Tomb, and the Lateran Complex. To these, Albertini adds the seven wonders of Christian Rome, such as St. Peter’s Basilica. Florence is treated at the end, Albertini focusing on modern landmarks like the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Flower and the church of Santa Maria Novella.
Albertini’s Septem mirabilia includes a brief reference to Vespucci’s voyages, though it does not mention Vespucci by name. The reference appears in the book’s dedication to King Manuel I of Portugal, where Albertini, comparing the king to Alexander the Great, writes that he has “added nations still unknown and unheard of” to the Catholic Church and his rule.
Ascarelli 25; European Americana 510/2; EDIT16 CNCE 740; Sander 165; Rossetti, Rome G-183.
REDISCOVERING ANCIENT ROME
(ROME GUIDEBOOK.) FAUNO, Lucio. De antiquitatibus urbis Romae, ab antiquis novisque auctoribus exceptis, & summa brevitate ordineque dispositis. Venice: Michele Tramezzino, 1549
Octavo (150 × 94 mm): [Maltese cross]8 A–T8, 160 leaves, complete with final blanks T7–8; ff. [viii], 129, [23]. Eighteenth-century vellum over boards, smooth spine divided by gilt fillets, gilt tooling in compartments, black morocco label, yapp edges, green silk bookmarker. Woodcut printer’s device on title-page and last leaf, elaborate woodcut initials. Faint and illegible early inscription on title page, old manuscript shelf marks on rear pastedown, small patches of skinning on front pastedown perhaps from bookplate removal. Vellum a little soiled and marked, shallow loss at edges of label, title page faintly toned with small paper repair to lower outer corner, light ink smudges on leaves F2–3, else generally bright and clean. A very good copy.
First Latin edition of this famous early guidebook to the antiquities of Rome, originally published in Italian the year before. More than a simple travel guide, Fauno’s work updates the previous studies on the city’s structure and monuments: “More than ever, the literary records of Rome’s bygone magnificence are connected to recent finds on the ground” (Fane-Saunders, p. 78).
Guidebooks to Rome, often titled “mirabilia Romae” (“the marvels of Rome”), appeared in print in the late fifteenth century and soon became an extremely popular genre of travel literature. At first based on written classical sources, the genre evolved as scholars begun to uncover and study the physical archaeological remains. Fauno’s approach towards the tradition is critical, questioning the veracity of contemporary scholarship and ancient authors alike. He describes the fragmentary remains of the ancient city in detail, highlighting recent discoveries such as inscriptions (he often transcribes them) and artefacts.
After providing a brief history of the foundation of Rome, Fauno describes the city’s walls, its circumference, and gates, then moves on to the flora, hills, valleys, and bridges. Fauno highlights the locations of baths, aqueducts, temples, arches, statues and other monuments as he encounters them. At the end is also a list of common abbreviations found on inscriptions and a useful index of all major locations.
An esteemed antiquarian and translator, Lucio Fauno (pseudonym of Giovanni Tarcagnota, d. ca. 1552) was part of the circle of Pope Paul III, Alessandro Farnese, to whom this book is dedicated. Working in collaboration with the printer Tramezzino, he published other works on Roman antiquities - chiefly translations of Flavio Biondo’s Roma instaurata (1542), Roma triumphante (1544), and Italia illustrata (1544). Fauno’s De antiquitatibus was later among the main sources of Andrea Palladio’s influential L’antichità di Roma (1554).
EDIT16 CNCE 35182. Peter Fane-Saunders, Pliny the Elder and the Emergence of Renaissance Architecture, 2016. [171560] £360
EARLY IMAGES OF THE UNIVERSE
68. SACROBOSCO, Johannes de, and Gerard of Cremona. Sphaera mundi. Theorica planetarum. Venice: Franciscus Renner de Hailbrun, 1478
Octavo: a–b8 c–d6 e–f 10; ff. [45] (of 48) leaves, lacking leaves e2, e9, e10, but with all blanks. Contemporary wallet-style limp vellum, binding repurposing early 15th-century manuscript document (with lettering visible beneath carta rustica pastedowns), spine lettered in manuscript, remnants of original ties. Housed in a custom quarter blindstamped pigskin solander box with cream cloth sides. With 5 woodcut diagrams and one table; titles printed in red. Vellum marked and creased, a little worming in places, patch of loss to spine exposing gatherings underneath, front inner hinge cracked and front cover detached from book block (rear hinge intact), intermittent light damp stains in margins of contents, occasional light foxing or marks, leaf e1 loose. A good copy.
First illustrated edition of “the most used textbook in astronomy and cosmography from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century” (Thorndike, p. 1), describing the structure of the pre-Copernican universe. De sphaera was written around 1230 and published in 1472 in Ferrara without illustrations. The following four incunable editions were also unillustrated. Renner’s choice to introduce woodcuts into the text was inspired by the design of earlier editions of Regiomontanus printed in Nuremberg.
The first edition of Sphaera Mundi was printed together with Gerard of Cremona’s Theorica Planetarum, another treatise derived from Ptolemy by way of the Arabic Almagest. Later editions left this out or substituted it with other related works.
The text is annotated throughout in a near-contemporary charming Latin hand in red ink. The early owner highlighted all the woodcut initials and added paragraph marks, chapter numbers, and index notes throughout; the woodcut showing a solar eclipse is hand-painted in red and green. More elaborate annotations, definitions of key concepts, appear on the initial and final blanks. A later inscription in Italian, at head of the rear pastedown, refers to the birth of printing, reading “Gio[vanni]. Gutenberg Maguntinus trovò la stampa nel 1440” (Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz found [= invented] printing in 1440).
The volume was later in the library of the Italian Carlo Malatesta Benigni of Fabriano (in the Marche region), with his inscription dated 1688 on an initial blank. He added “Impressum 1478” above his ownership inscription, and a classic warning on a final blank: “Fur cave ne nostrum rapiat tua dextera librum, Ni[si] dare vis lignis colla tenenda tribus” (Thief, watch that your hand doesn’t snatch my book away, unless you wish your neck to be held in three wooden sticks [i.e. the yoke]).
The leaves removed from the Theorica Planetarum feature illustrations of “Theorica Solis”, “Theorica Mercurij inter alis difficilior”, and “Theorica trium superiorum: & Veneris”.
BMC V: 195; Goff J402; Hain–Copinger *14108; Klebs 874.6; Pr 4175; Sander 6659. Lynn Thorndike, The Sphere of Sacrobosco and its Commentators, 1949. [171555] £7,600
EXPLORING THE COSMOS IN A SIXTEENTH-CENTURY CLASSROOM
69. SACROBOSCO, Johannes de, and Georg von Peuerbach. Opusculum de sphaera. Theoricae planetarum. Figurae item summa diligentia suis ubique locis appositae, ex quibus perfacile autoris sensus utrobique intelligi porest. Vienna: per Ioannem Singrenium, expensis Lucae Atlantsae, pridie Idus Augusti [i.e. 12 August], 1518
Small quarto (204 × 147 mm): a–b6 c4 d–e6 f 4 g–n6 (m4 misbound before m3); 62 leaves, unnumbered. Recased in contemporary vellum, remains of tawed leather ties. With 53 woodcut illustrations, 2 tables, printer’s device on recto of last leaf, woodcut floriated initials. Natural creasing and a few marks to vellum, title page discreetly repaired and reinforced at gutter, worm trail near gutter of d5–g3, occasional minor damp stain or fingersoiling in margins, a few small ink splashes and wax stains as expected, else generally clean. A very good copy.
A profusely annotated copy of the scarce first and only Viennese edition, featuring a world map based on Waldseemüller’s design, where part of America is visible. Compiled by a university student, the marginalia enrich the text with arithmetic, geography, astronomy, literature, and technical knowledge, offering a window into the early modern understanding and teaching of the universe.
An online institutional search returns nine institutional locations; we have traced only one other copy in auction records.
The book is annotated throughout in a rapid and dense contemporary Germanic hand. The astronomical content of Sacrobosco’s manual is linked in the annotations to many different disciplines. Geography and navigation feature prominently, not surprisingly as this was one of the works which inspired travellers to explore the world in the age of discovery. Next to Sacrobosco’s paragraph discussing the impossibility of living below the equator due to the climate, the reader notes that that Pomponio Mela and Vadianus instead talk about the existence of “Taprobana” (Sri Lanka), “a great island extremely rich in gold and precious stones”. In another section, Arabia is described as triplex as per the classical tradition (i.e. “Petrea”, “Deserta”, and “Felix”). The student defines the astrolabe, its shape and how to use it, and adds a nautical example to support the sphericity of the earth. Major relevant works
and authors (e.g. Aristotle, Euclid, Pliny, Ovid, Virgil, Alfarganus, and Ptolemy) are referenced throughout, very often in the context of highlighting the difference between the “ancient” and “modern” astronomers’ beliefs. Other annotations derive from commentaries printed in previous (mostly incunable) editions of De sphaera. Particular attention is dedicated to words and definitions (e.g. often the reader clarifies etymologies; on leaf B6 he adds the term “polar Star” as the name of the star “in the tail of the Ursa Minor”).
Internal evidence and similarities with other annotated copies in institutional holdings suggest that the owner was a student who attended the cosmography classes held on Sacrobosco at the University of Vienna, at some point between 1518 and the late 1540s. A note on the revolution periods of the various celestial spheres on leaf a5 (based on Pedro Ciruelo’s 1498 commentary) appears almost identical in a copy held in the Austrian National Library (part of the so-called “Vienna miscellany”, Cod. ser. n. 4265), which scholars believe was annotated by the Viennese academic Petrus Freylander or someone in his circle around 1530. A rather specific reference to Joachim Vadianus’s commentary on Pomponius Mela, first published in 1518 in Vienna (same year as this edition), also suggests a Viennese context for the inscriptions. The annotations overall are the same (identical content on the same pages, with minor phrasing variations) as those appearing in the copy held in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek of Munich (shelf no. 4 A.gr.b. 286), indicating that the two volumes belonged to students who attended the same classes. There is no mention of Copernicus’s heliocentric theory, suggesting this was annotated before or within a few years of the theory’s publication in 1543. The wording of a few notes is close to paragraphs in Hartmann Beyer’s Quaestiones novae, in libellum de Sphaera Iohannis de Sacro Busto (a commentary on De sphaera published in 1549), but it is difficult to establish if they were copied from it or from an earlier common source.
While the diagrams accompanying the Peuerbach are standard, the Sacrobosco is updated with new images taken from other sources, chiefly incunable editions of Regiomontanus and the 1514 edition of Peuerbach’s Tabulae eclypsium. The most notable image is perhaps an early depiction of a part of south America, in the world map on leaf d3 recto. The map was published in Martin Waldseemüller’s Globus Mundi (1509) and is here reproduced in outline (without text). Scholars believe that the uncredited editor was the Viennese humanist and astronomer Georg Tannstetter (also known as Collimitius, 1482–1535), the teacher of Vadianus and Apianus. He collaborated with Singriener on about a dozen publications and his coat of arms (a star inside a ring) appears in the woodcut on leaf a4 recto of this volume.
Peuerbach (1423–1461) was an Austrian scholar acquainted with Regiomontanus, and his work here is an introduction to the universe based on the lectures he gave in Vienna in the summer of 1454. De sphaera and Theoricae planetarum were first printed together in 1488 by Santritter.
Graesse VI, p. 210; Sphaera Corpus Tracer Database 1918; VD16 J718; not in Cantamessa; for the map, see: Shirley 30. Lynn Thorndike, The Sphere of Sacrobosco and Its Commentators, 1949. See also: Thomas Horst, The Reception of Cosmography in Vienna: Georg von Peuerbach, Johannes Regiomontanus, and Sebastian Binderlius, 2019.
[171605]
£14,000
BARTOLOMEO ZAMBERTI’S COPY, WITH A MAGNIFICENT ILLUMINATED BORDER BY THE PICO MASTER
70. SCHEDEL, Hartmann. Liber cronicarum cum figuris et ymaginibus. Nuremberg: by Anton Koberger, for Sebald Schreyer and Sebastian Kammermeister, 1493
Imperial folio (462 × 310 mm): 326 leaves (complete), ff. [20], 299, [1], with 6-leaf Sarmatian supplement (quire 55, last leaf blank with manuscript note) bound between ff. 66 and 267). Bound in sixteenth-century blind tooled goatskin over bevelled wooden boards, roll-border of knotwork design with flower tool, central panel and round centerpiece decorated with similar designs, brass corner- and centerpieces, carefully rebacked and repaired. Contemporary Italian illuminated border on f. 1, with a large initial of St. Peter (?), miniature of two astronomers, one ancient (Ptolemy) and one contemporary, a Greek motto (= “A Reminder of Famous Deeds”) and coat-of-arms of Bartolomeo Zamberti. 63 lines plus headline, Gothic letter, xylographic title-page, 645 woodcut illustrations by Pleydenwurff and Wohlgemuth repeated to a total of 1,809, some full-page, others double-page, including a double-page map of the world showing the Gulf of Guinea discovered by the Portuguese in 1470, and double-page map of northern and central Europe by Hieronymus Münzer. Two long sixteenth-century inscriptions on blank f. 259r and two seventeenth-century inscriptions on f. 266 and blank f. 326, 2 ff. nineteenth-century English manuscript notes about the illumination bound after the Register. Marginal discoloration on title, catalogue mark “15973” in gutter of f. [2]; gutter and outer edges of some index leave repaired, tears on
f. [6] repaired, not affecting legibility; repairs to heading of ff. 65, 79, 146, 250, 291, waterstaining in gutter (ff. CXIII–CXXII), paper flaw on f. 197v affecting 2 words, blank corners of ff. 225, 230, [235], 248 replaced; two small wormtracks in blank lower margin of final 20 ff., map of Europe repaired in gutter, toning in gutter and margins of scattered leaves. Overall a tall, fresh copy with the woodcuts in excellent impressions.
First edition, an outstanding copy of the first illustrated encyclopaedia published at the dawn of the discovery period, decorated with a magnificent illuminated border attributed to the Pico Master, and also containing firsthand observations and a drawing of the comet of 1507 by Bartolomeo Zamberti.
Bartolomeo Zamberti (born c.1473), Venetian scientist, humanist, and collector, was the first translator of Euclid from the original Greek (Venice, 1505). His standing in the intellectual community of his day is evinced by the fact that he pronounced the funeral oration of Giorgio Valla, whose mantle as the leading humanist interested in Greek mathematics he inherited. The long autograph note on f. 259r signed by Zamberti occurs on the first of the three blanks which Schedel has inserted in the work so that the reader could “emend, add, and record the deeds of rulers and private men in time to come”. On this blank, Zamberti records his prediction and subsequent observation of a comet in Venice on 1 April 1507, along with an accompanying sketch. Below this note is another inscription signed by Maximus Tacitus Spilimbergensis (Spilimbergo is in the Veneto), describing how he was ordered by Zamberti to record the effects of the devastating earthquake in Venice in 1511. He gives details of marble statues and masonry falling from St. Mark’s with the monks of San Giorgio Maggiore watching. The manuscript note on f. 266 records the appearance of a comet in 1680, “significans Turcharum excidium”, and describes the defeat of the Turks at Vienna at the hands of Jan III (Sobieski), King of Poland, which took place on September 12, 1685. The note on the blank f. 326, apparently in the same hand as the previous note, records earthquakes in Sicily, Mantua and Venice.
As a summation of geographical and universal knowledge, the Nuremberg Chronicle stands as a product of the Renaissance civilization celebrated in Jacob Burckhardt’s famous essay. It is revealing of Schedel’s world view that it is not a closed system, hence his inclusion of blank leaves for readers to complete the chronicle according to their own experience. It is telling that of all the things that Zamberti
could have recorded, what he did in fact record was his observation of a comet. It was close observation of the heavens and reflection upon such that would upset the traditional Ptolemaic cosmology and expand the horizons of the world in ways that not even Bartolomeo Zamberti could have foreseen.
The fifteenth-century Venetian artist known as the Master of the Pico Pliny, or simply the Pico Master, enjoyed a career spanning 1460 to 1505, in which they produced hand-painted decoration in both manuscripts and incunabula (e.g. nine extant copies of the 1472 Jenson Pliny) and designed woodcuts for printed books. Despite this prolific career, they remain anonymous and are identified based upon the stylistic illumination in a manuscript of Pliny’s Historia naturalis produced for the philosopher and founder of Christian Kabbalah, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94) in 1481: now Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS. Lat. VI, 245 (2976). (See The Painted Page: Italian Renaissance Book Illumination 1450–1550, p. 41, figure 28.) The illumination in this copy was identified as the work of the Pico Master by Prof. Jonathan J. G. Alexander of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
The most extensively illustrated book of the fifteenth century and a universally acknowledged masterpiece of complex design, the Chronicle was compiled by the Nuremberg physician, humanist and bibliophile Hartmann Schedel (1440–1514). The text is a year-by-year account of notable events in world history from the Creation to the year of publication, including the invention of printing at Mainz, the exploration of the Atlantic and of Africa, as well as references to the game of chess and to medical curiosities, including what is believed to be the first depiction of conjoined twins. The colophon on 266r marks the completion of the work of Hartmann Schedel; George Alt, a scribe at Nuremberg treasury who made the German translation, is the author of the remainder of the text.
The book is especially famed for its series of over 1,800 woodcuts depicting biblical subjects, classical and medieval history, and a large series of city views in Europe and the Middle East - Augsburg, Bamberg, Basel, Cologne, Nuremberg, Rome, Ulm and Vienna among them, also Jerusalem (and its destruction) and Byzantium. The double-page map of Europe includes the British Isles, Iceland and Scandinavia, and the Ptolemaic world map is apparently sourced from the frontispiece of Pomponius Mela’s Cosmographia (Venice, Ratdolt, 1488).
The Latin edition was printed in Koberger’s shop between May 1492 and October 1493. Wilson, The Making of the Nuremberg Chronicle (1976), approves Dr Peter Zahn’s count of probably 1,500 Latin copies printed, of which approximately 1,240 have survived. Although copies of Schedel are therefore far from rare, decorated copies with a distinguished provenance from a localizable and dateable milieu are rarely, if ever, seen on the market.
HC 14508*; BMC II 437; Klebs 889.1; Polain(B) 3469; Goff S307.
[170934] £250,000
EXCEEDINGLY RARE TEXT GUIDE TO STELLA’S CELEBRATED MAP OF GERMANY
71. STELLA, Tilemann. Kurtzer und Klarer Bericht vom Gebrauch und Nutz der newen Landstaffeln, sampt jren zugeordenten Scheiben oder Cirkeln in etliche Capitel verfasset dem günstigen leser zu gut. Wittenberg: Gedruckt durch Hans Krafft, 1563
Small octavo (142 × 93 mm): A–C8; 24 leaves, unnumbered. Early 20th-century stiff vellum, spine lettered in gilt. Woodcut initials. Library shelf label on spine, institutional stamp of Fürstlich Fürstenbergische Hofbibliothek Donaueschinger on titlepage verso. Light soiling and wear to boards, contents evenly tanned, leaf B1 reinforced at gutter. A very good copy.
The third edition (of four) of this very scarce, separately printed instructional pamphlet produced to accompany German Renaissance cartographer, astronomer, and mathematician Tilemann Stella (Latinized form of Tilemann Stoltz)’s widely celebrated map of Germany, first published in 1560.
The present pamphlet, a “user’s manual” for Stella’s 1560 map of Germany, firmly places that work in the context of Reformation science. It was not merely a topographical illustration of the region; through the use of this booklet (printed in the vernacular), a reader could employ the map as a navigational implement, sufficiently accurate and detailed to plan and execute travels and observe astronomical phenomena. The map was based on a 1528 work by the renowned cartographer Sebastian Münster, updated with firsthand knowledge from Stella’s own peregrinations and another thirty years of astronomical study. Following Münster’s model, the map is “inverted” (i.e. oriented to the South) in order to make navigation by the sun easy. This manual makes that navigation even easier, providing explicit instructions on how to prepare and operate the map’s rondels (by attaching silken thread to the center of each disc, somewhat longer than its radius, with a pearl at the end of the thread), and giving examples of how they could be used to calculate latitude, distance, and celestial events.
Four editions of this guide were printed in the sixteenth century: the first along with the map in 1560, a second in 1562, this edition in 1563, and a fourth in 1567. All four editions are of surpassing rarity, with none of them recorded in more than a handful of copies. OCLC records only two copies of any edition outside of Germany (the 1560 edition, at Oxford and the University of Pennsylvania). Of this 1563 edition, we note copies only at Thuringer University, the Landesbibliothek Mecklenburg, Sachsische Landesbibliothek, and Bayerische Stadtbibliothek. The map itself survives in only four copies, all located in Germany.
Karrow 72/B; OCLC 248549868; VD16 S9277.
[171626] £5,200
IN THE ORIGINAL ITALIAN
72. VARTHEMA, Ludovico di. Itinerario nello Egitto, nella Sorria nella Arabia deserta & felice, nella India, & nella Ethiopia. Le fede, el vivere, & costumi delle prefate provincie. Et al presente agiontovi alcune isola novemente ritrovate. Venice: Francesco di Alessandro Bindone & Mapheo Pasini compagni, 1535
Small octavo (146 × 97 mm): A–N8; 103 (of 104) leaves, final leaf N8 with printer’s device in facsimile. Late nineteenth-century vellum, smooth spine divided by gilt fillets and lettered in gilt, covers bordered with a single gilt rule, edges gilt. Large woodcut on title page depicting the author marking his discoveries on a globe. Some spotting to vellum, a little loss at tail of spine, faint foxing to endpapers, contents uniformly lightly browned, occasional small marks, paper flaws to leaves D5–E4 affecting a few letters, date recently copied in blue ink below colophon, else clean. A very good copy.
Scarce early Italian edition of Varthema’s influential account of his journey through the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Persia, and India, expanded to include Juan Diaz’s account of Grijalva’s Yucatan expedition of 1518.
Itinerario was first published in Italian in 1510; the first edition including Diaz’s narrative of central America was published in 1520 and reprinted in 1526. All early printed editions of this work are scarce in commerce, with only one copy of the present 1535 edition recorded at auction in the past 50 years, and no copies of the 1520 and 1526 Italian editions in over 100 years.
Ludovico Varthema, as famous in his own time as Columbus, posed as a mamluk named Yunus and escorted a pilgrim caravan to Mecca and Medina. Varthema’s is the first recorded eyewitness account by a European of the Islamic holy cities, indeed the first account of Mecca in print by any author, Muslim or otherwise. Varthema continued to travel for five years, providing a valuable primary witness for the state of overland travel through Asia, just as the Portuguese sea route was taking supremacy. After escaping imprisonment for being a Christian spy by means of the love of a Yemeni sultana, Varthema’s adventures took him to Somalia, through Persia halfway to Samarkand, and eventually to India. The combination of salacious firsthand detail, personal charisma, and picaresque exotic travels made his book an instant sensation.
Juan de Grijalva continued the exploration of the Mexican coast started by Cordoba the year before, reaching the area to the north of Veracruz towards the Rio Panuco. Grijalva’s report gave the Spaniards in Cuba an idea of the importance of Mexico, leading to the conquering expedition of Cortés. Diaz’s account is an important early source on the customs of the Aztecs encountered by the explorers.
Provenance: Dr Bent Juel-Jensen (1922–2006), Danish bibliophile, collector, and Medical Officer to the University of Oxford, with his Ethiopian bookplate on the front pastedown.
European Americana 535.20; Fumagalli 77; Sabin 98646.
[171584] £6,800
GRABHORN PRESS EDITION OF VESPUCCI’S FAMOUS LETTER
73. VESPUCCI, Amerigo - GRABHORN PRESS; LEWIS, Oscar (ed. & trans.). The Letter of Amerigo Vespucci. Describing His Four Voyages to the New World 1497–1504. San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 1926
Folio. Original vellum, spine lettered in ink. With the original slipcase. Hand-coloured map on title page, five decorative initials, headpiece, and tailpiece adapted by Valenti Angelo from contemporary sources. Vellum lightly soiled and buckled, as usual, discoloration to a single page opening form a formerly inserted slip, slipcase quite worn. A very good copy.
A fine Grabhorn Press edition of a new English translation of Vespucci’s famous letter to his friend Pietro Soderini, in which he relates the details of his four voyages to America. From an edition limited to 250 copies; this copy is number 190.
Vespucci’s letter to his friend Pietro Soderini was immediately controversial upon its publication ca. 1505–6, with Bartolomé de las Casas and other historians over the centuries accusing it of fabricating a “first voyage” from whole cloth in order to assert priority over Columbus. While more recent scholarship has tended in Vespucci’s favor, authors continue to argue both sides of the issue today.
This attractive, illustrated edition was newly translated into English from the Italian original (rather than one of the many unauthorized Latin editions), and is augmented by a historical introduction by historian Oscar Lewis, who provides not only a brief biography of Vespucci, but the historical context of the letter’s reception, publication, and controversy.
This is the first Grabhorn Press book illustrated by Valenti Angelo, who later illustrate several hundred more titles, including his own award-winning children’s book, Nino.
Provenance: James Linden, member of the San Francisco Roxburghe and Book Club of California. Linden wrote a brief biography and reminiscence of Angelo for the Book Club in 1982. Heller 85. [171637]
DETAILED BIBLIOGRAPHICAL STUDY OF EARLY NEW WORLD MAPS AND VOYAGES
74. WALDSEEMÜLLER, Martin - AVEZAC, Armand d’. Martin Hylacomylus Waltzemüller ses ouvrages et ses collaborateurs . . . par un géographe bibliophile. Paris: Challamel Ainé, 1867
Octavo. Original printed wrappers, rebacked in cloth, printed paper label, untrimmed. With half title. Front wrapper beginning to split at upper inner edge, later repaired chips to edges and corners with loss of one word in inscription, rear wrapper creased with small tear to upper outer corner, text tanned and foxed. A very good copy.
First separate edition, inscribed by the author on the front wrapper “Monsieur Natalis de Wailly, L’institut, Offert par l’Auteur”. The recipient, Natalis de Wailly, was lead administrator of the Royal Archives, and is credited with formulating the fundamental archival principle of respect des fonds
A presentation copy of this thorough study of Martin Waldseemüller by the accomplished French “geographer and bibliophile”, Armand d’Avezac. This is the first separately published edition, extracted and edited from a prior appearance in the comprehensive Nouvelles Annales des Voyages
Waldseemüller, the master German mapmaker of the early sixteenth century, has been immortalized in the field of Americana thanks to his 1507 wall map, the first document to name the New World “America”, which survives in a single copy. His various other maps and globe gores featuring and focusing on the newly discovered continent are almost universally rare and important, and there is no question that he is one of the towering figures of post-Columbian cartography.
The author goes through the early editions of Waldseemüller’s printed works and those containing his maps, describing their contents, physical makeup, and closely examining their similarities and differences. Titles examined include Waldseemüller’s Cosmographiae Introductio, Apianus’s work of the same title, the letters of Vespucci, Reisch’s Margarita Philosophica, and Ptolemy’s famous geography. Many titles and passages are reproduced in the text in quasi-facsimile. The rear wrapper contains printed advertisements soliciting subscriptions to the Annales des Voyages as well as other works available from the publisher.
D’Avezac was chief clerk of the Ministère de la marine for several decades from 1823, as well as a founder of the Société d’Ethnographie and six-time president of the Société de Géographie.
[171646] £280
Large octavo (244 × 170 mm). Full red crushed morocco by the Rowfant Bindery, spine and boards elaborately gilt, red morocco pastedowns ruled in gilt, silk endpapers, untrimmed, top edge gilt. Housed in a custom marbled paper slipcase. Portrait frontispiece, two folding plates of facsimiles, numerous in-text illustrations, and tipped-in note to subscribers. Gilt morocco bookplate of Henry Alden Sherman on front free endpaper. A trifle of shelf wear. A fine copy.
First edition, one of 385 copies, handsomely bound. This is an elaborate and well-illustrated biblio-biography of Charles Whittingham, founder of the Chiswick Press, and his nephew (also Charles). The book is extensively illustrated with portraits, facsimile letters, and recreations of their work, several of them in colour.
This copy is particularly notable due to its several layers of Grolier Club association. The elaborate binding was accomplished by the Rowfant Bindery, the successor to the club’s short-lived but luxurious Club Bindery, finished by the distinguished Gaston Pilon.
The gilt morocco bookplate on the front endpaper is that of Henry Alden Sherwin –co-founder of Sherman-Williams and member of the Grolier, Rowfant, and Caxton Clubs, and who gathered one of the great collections of fishing literature as well as of fine bindings, typography, and book arts. True to his collecting interests and fastidious nature, at the end of the volume Sherman has had bound in the original note to subscribers, the four-page illustrated prospectus for the book, and even the original green paper covering for the boards with the mark of the Chiswick Press, including the gilt green morocco backstrip mounted to its own leaf.
A beautiful copy of an attractive bibliographical publication, and a Grolier Club association through and through.
Asaf 24; Ong & Holzenberg P60.
[171670]
£600
75. WARREN, Arthur. The Charles Whittinghams Printers. New York: The Grolier Club, 1896
PIZARRO’S CONQUEST OF PERU
76. XEREZ, Francisco de. Conquista del Peru. Verdadera relacion dela conquista del Peru et provincia del Cuzco llamada la nueva Castilla. Conquistada por Francisco piçarro: capitan dela S.C.C.M. del Emperador nuestro señor. Salamanca: por Juan de Junta, 1547
Folio (285 × 200mm): a–c8; 23 (of 24) leaves, lacking terminal blank, ff. 22, [1]. Contemporary calf, blind-embossed and blind-stamped, spine compartments with elaborate blind-embossing featuring busts of a king, queen, and soldier, covers with oval centrepieces containing a Christ-less Crucifixion, but showing the three crosses and a skull at the base of Christ’s cross, Pascal lamb above and below. Title page with a large woodcut of a European battle scene and a woodcut architectural border in four parts. Gothic type in double-column format with two large woodcut initials. Endpapers renewed, repaired wormholes in several margins, scattered light waterstaining, uneven tanning, outer margin of colophon leaf repaired.
A later edition, after the first of 1534, of Francisco de Xerez’s important firsthand account of the conquest of Peru.
As one of the “Men of Cajamarca”, Xerez took part in the capture of the Inca leader, Atahualpa, the slaughter of his army, and the sharing of the ransom demanded of the Inca nation for the return of their leader. By training a notary public and practiced writer, he was by choice Pizarro’s secretary and confidante, the two having been close since at least 1524, when they met in Panama. Appended to Xerez’s narrative is Miguel de Estete’s brief account of Pizarro’s army’s journey from Cajamarca to Pachacamac and then to Jauja. Estete too was present at Cajamarca and is said to have been the first Spaniard to lay hands on Atahuallpa.
Two leaves notably feature contemporary manuscript annotations. The first note concerns the natives of Peru, saying that they were not “so false as the author says”. Rather, they were “suspicious of the Christians”. The second note takes issue with Xerez’s treatment of Santo Domingo, and reads in part: “Este hystoriador mal empleo su pluma en detenerse tanto y tan prolixo en la Ysla de Sto. Domingo, q[ue] es un punto comparado con toda la Tierra Firme”.
Xerez’s account was published in Seville in 1534 in Spanish as Verdadera Relación de la Conquista del Peru y Provincia del Cuzco Llamada la Nueva Castilla. Demand for news of the new and “exotic” kingdom of Peru, which had only been conquered in 1532, was keen not only in Spain, but all across Europe, leading to several later editions and translations. There are two issues of this edition: this is the issue as a stand-alone work, without the Oviedo history.
European Americana 547/17; Harrisse (BAV) 277; Medina (BHA) 130; Palau 376906; Sabin 105724, 57989. On the various early editions of Xerez, see: Pogo, “Early Editions and Translations of Xerez: Verdadera relacion de la conquista del Peru” in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, XXX [1936], pp. 57–84.
[171549] £12,000
VITAL EARLY CHRONICLE OF PERU
77. ZARATE, Augustin de. Historia del descubrimiento y conquista de las provincias del Peru, y delos successos que enella ha avido, desde que se conquistò, hasta que el Licenciado de la Gasca Obispo de Siguença bolvio a estos reynos: y delas cosas naturales que en la dicha provincial se hallan dignas de memoria. Seville: en casa de Alonso Escriuano, 1577
Folio (297 × 206 mm): ¶4 A–P8; 62 leaves, ff. [4], 117, [3]. Contemporary vellum, spine lettered in manuscript. Housed in an orange cloth clamshell case, gilt morocco label. Woodcut coat of arms on title page, initials throughout. Seventeenth-century ownership inscription “Do L[icenciad]o M[ano]el Barbosa” at head of titlepage, likely the Portuguese man of letters of Guimarães (d. 1639), and related inscription below; endpapers comprised of printer’s waste with an earlier legal text in gothic type, with running header “De acquirenda, vel amittenda possessione”. Vellum cockled, heavily soiled and stained, edges worn, cords lacking from rear hinge with small holes in vellum at joint, ties lacking, occasional soiling, staining, and paper flaws, tiny wormhole to extreme outer margin of gathering N through end, none affecting text. A good copy.
Scarce second Spanish edition of one of the first and best accounts of the history and conquest of Peru, following the original edition of 1555.
Agustín de Zárate was contador general de cuentas at the court of Castile, and was sent by Philip II to audit the Royal Treasury and tax collection process in Peru. He sailed with Viceroy Blasco Nuñez Vela in 1543, and remained in the New World until 1546. During his time in Peru, he was eyewitness to the rebellion of Gonzalo Pizarro, wherein he was charged with delivering the order for Pizarro to disband his army. In order to avoid execution by Pizarro’s men, he instead offered to return to Cuzco and relay their demands to the government, proffering his own recommendation on behalf of the rebel general. Upon his return to Spain (after another near-miss execution once his role in the rebellion became known), Zárate compiled his careful notes to write a history of Peru from the first arrival of Francisco Pizarro through the year 1550.
In addition to a chronicle of events, the first book of Zárate’s history is devoted to a discussion of the appearance, customs, and history of the Inca people. This 1577 edition is actually somewhat censored from the 1555 first edition, removing part of the discussion of Incan religion (particularly where it appeared to align too closely with Christianity), and smoothing over his involvement with Pizarro. The Historia was an immediate and lasting success, and served as a primary source for future chroniclers including López de Gómara and especially El Inca, Garcilaso de la Vega. Dutch translations were published in 1563, 1564, and 1573, and an Italian translation appeared in Venice in 1563. This remains only the second edition in the original Spanish, and precedes the first English translation of 1581 by four years.
“Of great historical value; it is the foundation of all subsequent histories of the period” (Hill). “One of the most important early histories of the Spanish conquest” (Church).
Church 120, 126 (ref); European Americana 577/48; Hill 1933; JCB (3)I:267; Medina (BHA) 249; Palau 379629; Sabin 106269.
[171557]
£14,000
MAKING THE FRA MAURO MAP KNOWN TO THE WORLD
78. ZURLA, Placido. Il mappamondo di Fra Mauro Camaldolese, descritto ed illustrato da D. Placido Zurla dello stess’ordine. Venice: 1806
Folio (377 × 256 mm), pp. 164. Contemporary vellum over boards, spine gilt with raised bands, leather labels, untrimmed. Folding map, one plate. Institutional ink stamps on title page and to margins occasionally throughout. Vellum somewhat soiled, boards slightly bowed, corners bumped, light foxing and tanning, faint damp stain to foot of a few leaves. Very good.
First edition of the first scholarly study of Fra Mauro’s famous map of the world, with the first published recreation.
In the mid-1450s, the Camadolese monk and mapmaker Fra Mauro was commissioned to make his large-scale map of the world by the Signoria of Venice, and spent several years with a team of artists and cartographers in creating what would be the pinnacle of medieval geographic knowledge. The only other copy made of the map was appropriately sent to King Alfonso V of Portugal, accompanied by a letter from Prince Henry the Navigator encouraging the king to continue Portugal’s program of world exploration. The eight-by-eight-foot map is justly celebrated for its remarkable accuracy in addition to its visual beauty. It is also significant as one of the first Western world maps to depict Japan, and for breaking with Medieval mapmaking tradition in a number of ways. South is oriented towards the top, no special consideration given Jerusalem, and no hypothesized location for the Garden of Eden is supplied. The significance of this was not lost on Mauro, who justifies these choices with text on the map itself.
Before becoming Cardinal Vicar of Rome, the author of the present work, Giacinto Placido Zurla, was a Camadolese monk of the same monastery as Mauro. As librarian, he became fascinated by the map under his custodianship and wrote this, its first full-scale scholarly treatment. The author goes through the map region by region, assessing the accuracy of Mauro’s depiction, theorizing about his sources, and making informed suggestions about his decision-making. Zurla’s work was instrumental in raising awareness about the map, which has since been studied in minute detail by two succeeding centuries of historians and has become known as one of Venice’s great treasures. His book contains only the second recreation of the map, following a facsimile created by William Frazer in 1804, and the first version available to the public.
171500] £1,200
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