AMPZING, Samuel [and Petrus SCRIVERIUS].
Beschryvinge ende lof der stad Haerlem in Holland: in rijm bearbeyd ...
Including: SCRIVERIUS, Petrus. Laure-Crans voor Laurens Coster van Haerlem, eerste vinder vande boeck-druckery.
Haarlem, Adriaen Rooman, 1628. 2 parts in 1 volume. 4to. Ad 1: With an allegorical frontispiece, 16 engraved plates, and a printer's device on the final page, the text is printed in roman, gothic and civilité type. Ad 2: With a woodcut printers device on the title page, a full-page engraved portrait, and a full-page engraved plate of the first printing office in Haarlem. Contemporary gold- and blind-tooled overlapping vellum, gold-tooled oval coat of arms of Haarlem in the centre of both boards, surrounded by a blind-tooled single fillet frame, green closing ties, red sprinkled edges. [88], 520, [8]; 1-5, [3], 9, 6-124 pp.
€ 6,500
First edition of this famous description glorifying the city of Haarlem, and one of the main early sources for the legend that Laurens Jansz. Coster was the actual inventor of the art of printing. The description itself, which is largely in verse and printed in three different types, is accompanied by beautiful plates. These plates include maps and town plans, views of streets, buildings, and interiors in and near Haarlem, and the earliest portrait of Coster. The extensive commentaries in the work were based on earlier writers, and documents found in the medieval archives of Haarlem.
The work was written by the Haarlem minister Samuel Ampzing (1590-1632) to promote Haarlem. He began in 1617 and published it in 1628, more than ten years later, aided by the well-known scholar Petrus Scriverius who lived in Leiden at the time. This history of the city was not superseded until Pieter Langendijks unfinished work nearly a century later.
Ad 2: First edition of this important work in praise of Laurens Jansz. Coster, in which the scholar Petrus Scriverius (1576-1660) confirmed and defended the legend (established in 1588 by Hadrianus Junius in his Batavia) that it was Coster who had invented printing with moveable type, a claim that was accepted for centuries on the basis of the generally respected scholarship of Scriverius. The work was often added to Ampzing's description of Haarlem.
The spine is somewhat soiled, two of the closing ties are nearly gone, the other two are torn, the boards are slightly rubbed. The work is lightly browned throughout, with an occasional stain. Otherwise a splendid and complete copy, with provenance of Antiquariaat Meijer Elte in the Hague. Ad 1: Ekama 120; Nijhoff & V. Hattum 6; STCN 823048063 (26 copies); ad 2: Haitsma Mulier & Van der Lem 14; STCN 823047857 (28 copies); cf. Hellinga-Querido, L. & Wolf, C. de., Laurens Janszoon Coster was zijn naam (1988), esp. pp. 79-82; Roscam Abbing, M. & Tuynman, P., Petrus Scriverius. A key to the correspondence ... (2018), p. 259; Id., Om de eer van Haarlem, Scriverius verdediging van Laurens Janszoon Coster, in: De zeventiende eeuw, 30 (2014), pp. 39-75.
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