DONI, Anton Francesco. La libraria del Doni fiorentino. Venice: Gabriele Giolito de Ferrari & Fratelli, 1550.

A landmark of Renaissance bibliography and one of the earliest attempts to map an entire national literary culture through print: Anton Francesco Doni’s La Libraria, the first bibliography in a European vernacular language and the first systematic survey of Italian printed books.

Printed in Venice by the great Giolito press in 1550, the present copy belongs to the enlarged and censored second Giolito issue, recomposed in a denser setting and revised following Doni’s bitter quarrel with Lodovico Domenichi. Preserved in an attractive nineteenth-century vellum binding and carrying the provenance of the great modern collector T. Kimball Brooker, the volume survives as both an important bibliographical monument and a revealing witness to the rivalries, ambitions, and politics of Renaissance literary culture.

Venice and the Birth of Literary Bibliography

Few books capture the intellectual world of Renaissance Venice more vividly than La Libraria.

Conceived by the polymath, satirist, editor, and man of letters Anton Francesco Doni, the work attempted something radically new: not merely listing books, but charting the broader ecosystem of Italian literary production itself. Authors, translators, printers, vernacular works, and commercial book culture all appear within its pages, transforming the book into a compact map of mid-sixteenth-century Italian intellectual life.

At the moment of publication, Venice stood at the centre of European printing. Through presses such as that of Gabriele Giolito de Ferrari, vernacular Italian literature was becoming increasingly standardized, portable, and commercially successful. Doni’s bibliography emerged directly from this explosion of print culture and reflects the growing interconnectedness of literary reputation, translation, commerce, and publishing.

In many respects, La Libraria anticipates the modern idea of national bibliography centuries before such projects formally existed.

The Giolito Edition

The present edition was printed by Gabriele Giolito de Ferrari & Fratelli, among the most important publishing houses of the Italian Renaissance.

Giolito’s editions helped define the appearance of vernacular Italian literature during the Cinquecento, combining elegant typography, portable formats, and commercial sophistication. His famous phoenix device appears prominently on both the title page and the verso of the final leaf, lending the volume strong visual identity and immediate recognizability among collectors of Renaissance printing.

This second Giolito issue was substantially recomposed from the earlier edition. The text was reset in a denser format of 42 lines per page rather than the 34-line setting of the earlier printing, allowing Giolito to incorporate additions and corrections and create a fuller, more commercially useful bibliographical survey.

Scholars have suggested that although the title page retains the date 1550, the present enlarged issue may in fact have been released in 1551 for circulation together with Doni’s Seconda libraria.

The Censored Domenichi Issue

The present edition possesses additional historical significance because it preserves visible traces of literary censorship and personal rivalry within the Renaissance republic of letters.

Following a serious quarrel between Doni and the writer Lodovico Domenichi, Doni reportedly denounced his former collaborator to the Inquisition. In the present revised issue, references to Domenichi were systematically suppressed compared to the earlier state of the work.

The bibliography therefore becomes more than a neutral catalogue of books. It also records the tensions, jealousies, reputational conflicts, and political pressures shaping literary culture in Renaissance Italy. A work intended to document the world of authors and printers simultaneously reveals the instability of that world itself.

Printed Features

The title page bears the large woodcut Giolito phoenix device, repeated again on the verso of the final leaf above the register.

The text is decorated throughout with woodcut historiated initials, among them a particularly striking large initial “L” opening the “Ai lettori” address. The initial contains a comic-erotic scene characteristic of the lively ornamental vocabulary used in sixteenth-century Venetian printing. Although likely drawn from the printer’s reusable stock rather than designed specifically for this text, it perfectly complements the worldly, satirical, and playful atmosphere associated with Doni himself.

The impressions throughout remain generally crisp and well inked, preserving the visual appeal of the italic types, phoenix devices, and decorative initials particularly well.

Provenance

Purchased in 1990 from the Dutch antiquarian bookseller and bibliographer Bob de Graaf of Nieuwkoop.

Later in the celebrated library of T. Kimball Brooker, retaining the characteristic Brooker red bookplate and collection tag from the Bibliotheca Brookeriana. The volume subsequently appeared in the Sotheby’s dispersal of the Brooker collection.

A later pencil bibliographical note on the front flyleaf identifies the issue and cites both Bongi and Ricottini Marsili-Libelli, recording the variant final leaves and suppression of Domenichi’s name. The note remains an interesting witness to the book’s modern scholarly handling and bibliographical study.

Binding

Late nineteenth-century vellum binding, approximately 133 × 81 mm, with title lettered vertically in black along the spine, blue edges, and marbled endpapers.

The restrained vellum binding suits the scholarly and bibliographical nature of the work particularly well while preserving the tactile charm of the small-format Renaissance original.

Condition

Very good antiquarian condition.

Complete. Pages generally crisp and well preserved with light foxing toward the conclusion. Joints firm. Marbled endpapers with some damage to the upper pastedown from the removal of an earlier bookplate.

The volume remains attractive, sound, and highly readable, preserving the Giolito phoenix devices, historiated initials, register, and Brooker provenance materials.

References

Adams D817; Mortimer, Harvard Italian 16th Century Books, 163; USTC 827610; EDIT16 CNCE 17683; Ricottini Marsili-Libelli, Anton Francesco Doni no. 22. For broader discussion see Giordano Castellani, “‘Non tutto ma di tutto’: La Libraria del Doni,” La Bibliofilía 114 (2012), pp. 327–352.