Folger-specific note
From dealer's description: "HOMER. Homeri poetae clarissimi Ilias per Laurentium Vallensem Romanu Latina facta. Cum indice. Cologne, Hero Alopecius [i.e. Fuchs], [1522]. 8vo, ff. 272, [1 (blank)], [16 (index and errata)]; title-page within a woodcut border (featuring the Adoration of the Magi, the arms of Cologne at the head), woodcut intials; title-page dusty, small hole to woodcut border, a few spots and stains, but a very good, crisp copy in contemporary English calf, covers blind-stamped twice with a Flemish-made panel by Jan Tys of Mechelen, neatly rebacked preserving the original spine; pastedowns from a fourteenth-century English manuscript of Grosseteste, Commentarius in Posteriorum Analyticorum libros (the rear pastedown over printed waste, just visible as a result of some minor worming), faded manuscript title ‘Ilias’ to fore-edge; contemporary ownership inscription to title of ‘W. Tailer’, with his initials stamped in blind to each cover between the panels. First Cologne edition of Valla’s Latin translation of the Iliad, first printed in 1474, a very attractive copy in a contemporary English binding, employing a panel made by Jan Tys of Mechelen, adopted by an as yet unidentified English binder on a number of bindings in the early 1520s. The panel features a vine and animals surrounded by text, and was doctored upon import to England to obliterate the binder’s name with a pattern of dots and stars, now reading ‘Ligatus per manus … qui petit a malis erui et semper protegi per manus domini’. See Oldham AN7, citing Goldschmidt 106, Broxbourne R. 852 and St Alban’s X.2, all on works printed 1522–3. Like the present example, Goldschmidt’s features endpapers of English manuscript waste. The Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla (1406–1457), had completed his prose rendition of the first sixteen books in the 1440s, on commission by King Alfonso V of Aragon. The remainder of the text was translaed by one of Valla’s pupils Francesco Griffolini. Valla (1406–1457) ‘gave the humanist program some of its most trenchant and combative formulations, bringing the study of Latin to an unprecedented level … his Elegantiae linguae Latinae, a manual for the correct use of Latin syntax and vocabulary … became a bestseller throughout Europe’ (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). As well as Homer he translated Thucydides and Herodotus into Latin. For an English-printed edition of the Iliad in either Latin or Greek, readers would have had to wait until 1591, ten years after the first English translation by Arthur Hall. Provenance: contemporary signature to head of title ‘Henry Gibb[?]’ [perhaps Gibbe or Gibbon], unidentified; contemporary stamped initials and signature to middle of title of ‘W. Tailer’, possibly the William Tailer (Taylor) who matriculated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1532–2, proceeding to fellow in 1534; ownership inscription of John Tailer to rear endpaper; defaced sixteenth-century ownership inscription upside down to foot of title ‘Sum BERNARD QUARITCH LTD RAREBOOKS@QUARITCH.COM liber …. Starr’, below that ‘Sum liber John Starr’, in a seventeenth-century hand; sold at Sotheby’s on 18–19 November 1974 (£65, bought by Tulkens). Uncommon. Library Hub and OCLC record two copies in the UK: British Library (John Leland’s copy, with annotations) and the Middle Temple; and four in the US: Cornell, Folger, Chicago, and Wisconsin. BNHCat H 453; USTC 663890; VD16 H 4662." Ordered from Bernard Quaritch, D9786, 2024-11-15, email quote Note to catalogers: Heather suggests to add a separate record for the MS materials written on the front and back covers
