LEGENDS IN THE MAKING
Original price
£7,500.00
-
Original price
£7,500.00
Original price
£7,500.00
£7,500.00
-
£7,500.00
Current price
£7,500.00
Jacobus de Voragine: Lombardica historia que a plerisque aurea legenda sanctorum appellatur. [Strasbourg: Georg Husner], 1502.
Full discussion available here.
Post-incunable copy of the highly influential Legenda Aurea, with evidence of a fascinating journey across central Europe in the early sixteenth century. The textblock was printed in Strasbourg but bound (using local printer’s waste) in Nuremberg, before finding its way to a Hungarian mathematician.
Details
29 x 21 cms in binding, folio, ff. 258. All blanks present. Variant with point after ‘appellatur’ on title page. Text in two columns, undecorated. Occasional foliation in pencil. Sixteenth-century manuscript addition of hagiographic material relating to Saint Wolfgang (Bishop of Regensburg, d. 994) on the title page (sig. 1-1r) and four of the five original blanks (sigs. 1-1v, 2-6r, N8r, and N8v).
Bound in contemporary calf over wooden boards, with blind-tooled decoration almost certainly completed in Nuremberg, possibly by the ‘Madonna, Nuremberg’ workshop (active around 1473–1503). Fragment from an incunable used as the rear pastedown. [Johannes de Turrecremata]: Quaestiones Evangeliorum de tempore et de sanctis. [Nuremberg: Friedrich Creussner, 1478], fol. 129r.
Provenance: Christopher Pühler (approx. 1500–1583), mathematician and pupil of Peter Apian (inscription sig. N7v).
Condition (textblock): Light browning, occasional staining, short wormtrail to outer margin (entirely blank) of some 23 leaves, single worm holes mainly towards beginning and end affecting the odd single letter. Else, neat repair to tear in sigs. D6 and D7, affecting two letters on each verso, small burn on sig. p2 obscuring a two-letter word on the recto, but overall in good condition.
Condition (binding): loss to head of spine, tears and loosening to tailcap, extensive historic worming to boards (and consequent dust); clasps missing, although the lower anchor plate and part of the upper anchor plate remain; rubbing and wear, gold fading. Some damage to pastedowns and front free endpaper, including to the incunable fragment used as pastedown at end.
Bibliography:
Quaestiones (1478): ISTC it00546000, GW M48299.