ATTRACTIVELY PRESENTED LEGAL INCUNABLE - ONE COPY IN NORTH AMERICA

Baysio, Guido de [ed. Petrus Albinianus Trecius, with additions by Paulus Pisanus]: Rosarium decretorum. Venice: Reynaldus de Novimagio, 12 December 1480.

Full discussion available here.

This scarce incunable – one of just 22 located copies worldwide – is a particularly attractive copy of the third edition of Guido de Baysio’s important commentary on Gratian’s Decretum, a foundational collection of canon law. This incunable is impressively rubricated and sheds interesting light on working practices in medieval book decoration, and survives in a late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century binding with particularly intricate blind-tooled decoration. The edition has interesting new letters at beginning and end and the copy has early marginalia and handwritten corrections.

Details

One volume, folio, 41 x 29.5 cms (in binding), ff. 415 [lacks final blank]. Accurate foliation in pencil on every hundredth folio. Text mostly in two columns.

Decoration: Approx. 20 large decorative initials in red and blue (typically c.8 lines in height). Smaller rubricated initials in red or blue throughout. A mixture of printed and handwritten guide letters often visible. Running titles on rectos in red (sometimes shaved).

Bound in late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century alum-tawed pigskin over wooden boards. Both covers tooled in blind, the upper cover with the coat of arms of St Michael’s Abbey, Metten. Replacement fastenings. Red edges.

Condition (binding): Overall well preserved, with some worming to both covers (mostly infilled), crack to upper joint at base of spine, a few scratches to lower cover.

Condition (textblock): Headlines and marginalia sometimes shaved. Worming at start and end of textblock (often in blank areas, but at most affecting about a dozen letters per page). Light browning and foxing, occasional small tears and losses to blank outer margins.

Provenance: Inscription (sig. a2r) and binding stamps connected with  the library of St Michael’s Abbey, Metten (OSB), which was dispersed in the early nineteenth century during secularisation. Formerly owned by Albert Ehrman (1890–1969), founder of the Broxbourne Library.

ISTC ib00287000. GW 3746. BMC V 256. Between them, ISTC, GW and OCLC show 21 copies in public institutions, of which only three outside mainland Europe (British Library, Brompton Oratory Library, and Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut (Watkinson Library). This is the only located copy in trade (seen twice before at auction, 1979, 2010).