Books

"THE MOST CELEBRATED AND MOST BEAUTIFUL HERBAL EVER PUBLISHED" Basel: Michael Isingrin, 1542. First edition. Folio in 6s (14 9/16" x 9 7/16", 371mm x 240mm). [Full collation available.] With 509 full-page wood-cuts integral to the text (of which two are portraits) and a pair of smaller wood-cut tail-pieces to p. 629; all with original hand-color. Bound in contemporary panelled German calf over wooden boards (re-backed to style). On the spine, five raised bands. Brass fore-corner-brackets. Re-backed to style. Rubbing and patches of wear to the extremities, with the fore-corner-brackets of the rear board (nails remaining at the lower fore-corner) and the upper edge of the upper fore-corner of the front board (nails remaining) perished. [Full condition report available.] Altogether a remarkably clean copy, with a little pigment-burn or offsetting. Author and owner ("LEGRAND") manuscript to the fore-edge of the text-block. Eleven leaves of manuscript indices bound in before (6) and after (5) the text, signed by the author at the foot of the recto of the first leaf ("J.J.B. Lestiboudois ipse(?) scripsit"). Ownership signature and date to the title-page ("ex Libris Lamberti/ Michaelis Winckelman/ insulensis pharmacopæi/ 1714"). Manuscript additions and corrections to the printed Latin names of nearly all illustrations (in the hand of Lestiboudois, likely; some with astrological symbols for planets) with some graphite additions and five longer French manuscript notes in a slightly later hand (to pp. 227, 356, 451, 833 and 865). Leonhart Fuchs (1501-1566) is one of three men -- Brunfels and Bock, Fuchs being the latest -- regarded as the German father of modern botany. For the first 1500 years of the modern era or so, Classical authors (Pliny the Elder, Dioscorides and Galen -- the latter two writing in Greek) dominated the study of plants. Brunfels, Bock and Fuchs all used wood-cuts, which could be printed alongside set text from a single forme or even page, to vivify their work. Printing and the Mind of Man calls this "the most celebrated and most beautiful herbal ever published." When colored (well, and contemporaneously; Stafleu-Cowan notes: "Original coloured copies are rare") the illustrations could be nearly as useful as the text. Fuchs organizes the plants alphabetically by their Latin names (the genus Fuchsia is named after him). More than a quarter are non-native to Europe, including imports from Asia and, in particular, the Americas (maize, pumpkin, chilies). In each case the illustrations are markedly accurate, showing not only leaves and flowers but root-systems and occasional inset details. The present volume has passed through the hands of several important working botanists. Of the "Legendre" who marked his ownership on the fore-edge -- a habit of early book collectors -- little can be said. Lambert Michel Winckelman (d. 1755) was a pharmacist in Lille ("insulensis pharmacopæi") as well as an influential botanist, who was engaged in the preparation of an herbal himself but never lived to see it completed. Jean-Baptiste Lestiboudois (1715-1804) served as chief pharmacist for the French army from 1739. He settled in Lille that same year, and must surely have known Winckelman. In 1770 Lestiboudois was named professor of botany, and published several works -- including a reconciliation of the work of Tournefort, a French Jesuit botanist, with that of Carolus von Linnaeus. It is therefore with considerable authority that he added his two indices of Linnaean concordances, and presumably his hand that emended the illustrations' captions. The volume eventually passed into the collection of Fr. Redmond Ambrose Burke (purchased from his sale, Sotheby's New York, 3 June 1997, lot 116), who himself published on the Linnaean index. Adams F-1009; Blunt, Beautiful Flower Books pp. 48-56; Fairfax Murray, German 175; Hunt I.48; Nissen, BBI 654; Norman 846; Printing and the Mind of Man2 69; Pritzel 3138; Stafleu-Cowan 1909; VD16 F 3242.