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EARLY 17TH-CEN. RICHLY GOLD-TOOLED FRENCH DOS-Ą-DOS BINDING
1593 & 1604 POCKET EDS. OF REPUBLICAN ROMAN COMEDIES
[BINDING - DOS-Ą-DOS]. PLAUTUS, Titus Maccius. Comoedię viginti.
Leiden, Franciscus Raphelengius I/Officina Plantiniana, 1593.
WITH: TERENTIUS (TERENCE), Publius. Comoedię sex.
Leiden, Franciscus Raphelengius II/Officina Plantiniana, 1604. Agenda format 24mo in 8s (11 x 5.5 cm: binding 11.5 x 6 x 5 cm). With 2 different Plantin woodcut publisher's devices on the 2 title-pages. Bound dos-ą-dos in contemporary, richly gold-tooled French tan goatskin morocco (the spines and boards showing hundreds of impressions of a dozen small flower and leafy branch tools), with the patron's initials "MK" in the central oval on each board, and the smooth spines decorated as single surfaces (not divided into compartments), gilt edges, with a small slit in the board of the Terentius for a single cloth tie (lacking). With seventeenth-century owners' inscriptions by Ottwell Newrell(?), Charles J... (dated 24 October 1663), J.P.(?) Langham of University College London, and later owners' inscriptions, stamps and bookplates. Preserved in a modern half-morocco slipcase.
| Orders and Information | € 25000 |
Two rare pocket editions of the complete surviving plays (all comedies) of the two principal playwrights of classical Rome, both from the Republican period, here in a remarkable early French dos-a-dos binding of richly gold-tooled morocco decorated ą petit fer. The books were printed in matching format and typography. The Plautus contains twenty plays and the Terrentius six. Plautus (ca. 250-ca. 184 BC), the first major literary figure of classical Rome, and Terentius (ca. 190-ca. 158 BC) were both influenced by Greek comedy, especially Menander, and in their turn influenced Shakespeare and Moličre. Some Greek comedies are known only through their adaptations. They were the most popular plays to be performed at the sixteenth and seventeenth-century Latin schools in the Netherlands and elsewhere, Plantin produced pocket editions of both at Antwerp beginning in the 1560s, and the present editions closely follow his unannotated 24mo editions for students, published in 1588. Their wacky and often bawdy humour continues to appeal today, many characters, scenes and jokes from several of the Plautus plays having served as the basis for the film "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum." We have located only one other copy of the present edition of Terentius, at the Heidelberg University Library.
The binding is a very early example of the new style ą petit fers that developed in France ca. 1600 (and was to gradually succeed the "fanfare" style), with intricate patterns built up from hundreds of impressions of small tools. We are grateful to Jan Storm van Leeuwen for bringing our attention to a binding (not dos-a-dos) at the Royal Library in The Hague that is decorated in an almost identical manner and surely by the same unidentified French binder. It uses the same three leafy branch tools and probably at least two of the same flowers to make very similar patterns on the boards and spines, also has the patron's initials in a central oval, and also has the edges gold-tooled with a single line, broken in the central part of each edge by a series of parallel diagonal lines. Neither the "MK" who commissioned the present binding nor the "FP" who commissioned the other has been identified, but "MK" is more likely to be German, Dutch or East European than French or English. The name in the 1663 inscription has been struck through, so that the family name is difficult to make out. It might be James, and the other early owners' inscriptions suggest the book was in English hands already in the seventeenth-century. The endpapers are made from printed waste from an octavo edition of Cicero's Epistulae ad Familiares (here X 10.29-30) set in an Aldine-style italic type (87.5 mm/20 lines) that might date from the 1520s and would have been old-fashioned by 1550, and manuscript waste from an unidentified Latin work (with the name "Franncis Brode" written upside down in the manuscript's foot margin). Each unribbed spine is decorated as a single surface (not divided into compartments), the thicker one with a flower border in the same style as those on the boards. In very good condition and only slightly trimmed (with one fore-edge bolt still unopened), with the fore-edge margin of the Terentius title-page slightly darkened. The binding also very good, with only a couple small and unobtrusive worm holes and minor wear around the corners. Student pocket editions of the leading classical Roman playwrights in a lovely little French dos-ą-dos binding, richly gold-tooled in the early seventeenth-century and with the patron's initials.
