Available Copies from Independent Booksellers
Price: US$263.07 + shipping
Condition: Very Good
Description: ~Original tan paper to boards. Gilt lettering to front board and spine. Boards and spine darkened, with darkening to front board marking where a book has lain on it askew. Mild marking and rubbing to rear board. Wear to board corners. Top edges trimmed, other edges untrimmed. Small 4to (18.5 x 26.8cm). Hinges sound. Endpapers uncracked at gutters. Limited edition of 500 copies, printed by the Chiswick Press. Very slight foxing to endpages and endpapers. 1890 reprint of the 1592 English translation of the first book of Francesco Colonna's dreamlike and obscurely allegorical Hypnerotomachia Polyphili, first published in 1499 by Aldus Manutius. With a preface by Andrew Lang recounting his brief possession of one of the few copies of the 1592 translation (he did not realise its value at the time) and explaining the method behind the current volume - the English versioning of Colonna's notoriously intricate and Latinate Italian has been 'reprinted with absolute fidelity', but the Elizabethan woodcuts have been substituted with some of the justly celebrated engravings from the 1499 edition, one of the most beautiful incunabula ever printed. A fine limited edition reprint of first English translation of this extraordinary work, which also stands as an achievement of 19th-century book design. The Chiswick Press, which adapted the Aldine anchor into its own emblem, was known in its work with publisher William Pickering for its 'simply-designed title pages following the Aldine model' (Ing 1986, 157), and had highlighted its debt to Manutius with its mid-century series of 'Aldine Editions', here - albeit at one remove, through the 1592 edition - encounters one of the greatest achievements of Aldine typography. ~Robust packaging. Overseas tracking available on request. Size: xvii, (9), 248pp
Seller: St Philip's Books, P.B.F.A., B.A., Oxford, United Kingdom