Details
MANUTIUS, Paulus (Paolo Manuzio). Epistolarum Libri XII. Ejusdem Praefationes, cum Summariis ac Notis Joannis Kirchmanni, & Indicibus Consuetis. Accesserunt huic tertiae Editioni, M. Jacobi Thomasii ad Lectorem praeloquium: Elogia Eloquentiae Manutianae: Praefatio una Manutii, ante hac desiderata: & Epistolarum ad Manutium appendix. Leipzig: Johann Herbord Klos, 1698.
Third edition of the scholarly Leipzig recension of Manutius’s letters. Octavo, 170 × 100 mm. [xliv], 808, [8] pp., with the engraved portrait frontispiece of the author. Text in Latin. Contemporary vellum with yapp fore-edges, sewing supports laced through, spine titled in ink in an early hand, edges stained blue-green. Complete.
The collected Latin letters of the son and heir of Aldus Manutius. Paolo Manuzio inherited the Aldine Press of Venice with its anchor-and-dolphin device, printed some 350 editions weighted toward the Latin classics, and from 1561 directed the papal press in Rome. His letters, addressed to princes, cardinals, and the scholars of Europe, were prized for more than a century as the purest school of Ciceronian prose — “a model of letter writing in elegant Ciceronian Latin” (Brigham Young University, Aldine collection). Even his fiercest contemporary critic conceded, in words reprinted in this edition: “Huic nemo, qui sanus sit, ad puritatis & elegantiae latinae summam quicquam defuisse dixerit” — no sane man would deny him the summit of purity and elegance in Latin.
The edition is the work of Jakob Thomasius (1622–1684), professor at Leipzig and the teacher of the young Leibniz, who first issued Manutius’s letters in this annotated form in 1669; the present third edition adds his preface to the reader, the Elogia of Manutian eloquence, a previously unpublished preface of Manutius, and an appendix of letters addressed to him. The philological summaries and notes are those of Johann Kirchmann (1575–1643). The four Latin verses beneath the portrait are Thomasius’s own, styling Manutius a twin of Cicero in eloquence. The edition is not recorded in VD17, the German national bibliography of seventeenth-century printing.
This copy survived three and a quarter centuries in a single princely library, and carries its own small archive: the library’s classed shelfmark “D. VI. 6. 4” in red, an inventory number, and a nineteenth-century librarian’s bibliographic note on the pastedown ending with the price the library once paid for it — “Constat 45 xr.” (45 kreuzer) — together with the observation that Aldine editions of the classics “were esteemed equal to manuscripts.”
Literature
OCLC 68851892; Bibliothèque nationale de France FRBNF30874201; K10plus PPN 214001350; not in VD17. On the edition and its editor: Varani, Studia Leibnitiana 31 (1999); Jaumann, Neue Deutsche Biographie 26 (2016); Mercer, in Leibniz and His Correspondents (Cambridge 2004). On the author: Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, s.v. Manuzio, Paolo.
Provenance
Fürstlich Oettingen-Wallerstein’sche Bibliothek, Schloss Seyfriedsberg, Swabia — blue oval stamp to title page, shelfmark and librarian’s note to pastedown. The lordship of Seyfriedsberg was held by the house of Oettingen-Wallerstein from 1667 (Historischer Atlas von Bayern); portions of the Seyfriedsberg library were dispersed at auction in Munich in the 1930s.
Condition
Very good. Minor scuffing and soiling to the vellum; light, even toning throughout; princely library stamp to title page as described. Binding sound, text clean and complete with the portrait — an honest, unrestored copy.
The Renaissance’s model of Ciceronian correspondence, by the heir of the Aldine press, in the edition of Leibniz’s teacher — three and a quarter centuries in one princely Swabian library, in contemporary vellum.
Atelier Zweig · Item 394315
