Aristotle.

Count Karoly Imre Sandor de Reviczky (?), catalogue p. 29; George John, Earl Spencer; John Rylands University Library of Manchester, with monogram and stamps (sale in our rooms, 14 April 1988, lot 10); J.R. Ritman

HC *16578; GW 2334; BMC v 553, 555-556, 558; Goff A959; Klebs 83.1; Renouard pp. 7, 10-11 & 16; Dibner 73; Osler 229; Norman 70; PMM 38

editio princeps of Aristotle. When Chaucer’s clerke of Oxenford spoke of the books at his bed he included Aristotle:

For hym was levere have at his beddes heed
Twenty bookes, clad in blak or reed,
Of Aristotle and his philosophie,
Than robes riche, or fithele, or gay sautrie. (Prologue 293-296)

whose position in the Latin Middle Ages, albeit in a tradition removed from the original Greek text, was from one end of Europe to the other impregnable. He was ille philosophus.

The fame of Aldus rests on the books he printed in Greek. Others had printed a few books in Greek, one very substantial, the 1488 Homer, but Aldus’s grandest project was, without doubt, the printing of the works of Aristotle in the original Greek, to which were added works by Theophrastus (not the famous Charakteres), Galen, Porphyry, Philo Judaeus and others, but from which were omitted the Poetics and Rhetoric. This undertaking, huge in terms of both extent of text and the technicalities of printing, was spread over several years. It was a landmark in humanist scholarship, which held its position until Immanuel Bekker’s edition of Aristotle of 1831. Erasmus, in the preface to Bebelius’s edition of Aristotle, wrote in 1531 to John More of Aldus having erected a building, of how he was the first to commit to type an author than whom scarcely any other is worthier of being read, and of how prior to his edition 'illum habebamus, sed ita versum [translated], ut ad intelligendum Delio, quod aiunt, natatore esset opus…’, an expression which he explained in his Adagia.

Coming some years after the controversy of the 1450s and 1460s as to the respective position of Plato and Aristotle, it provided a handsomely printed version of the original Greek texts, many of which were currently available in manuscript copies, made by many of the leading Greek scribes of the period.

Three manuscripts used as printer’s copy survive: one at Harvard, containing Theophrastus’s botanical works, Porphyry and various other works (Harvard gr. 17, f. 111 verso (Theophrastus HP. II, 7-2-5) is reproduced in Wolfenbüttel 1978); and two in Paris at the Bibliothèque nationale (Paris. Gr. 1848, Metaphysics and Paris. Suppl. Gr. 212, Historia animalium). A number of scholars were involved in the undertaking in various capacities: Linacre, Musurus, Alessandro Bondini, Lorenzo Maioli from Genoa, Francesco Cavalli and others made their manuscripts available.

The volumes, sometimes as sets, sometimes as groups of volumes, quickly passed into the possession of scholars, and thence into libraries as a true keimnliou: Corpus Christi College, Oxford, acquired one in 1519 from its founder: Magdalen College, Oxford, acquired its volumes in 1522; Thomas Linacre’s set on vellum, presumably brought back to England in 1499, is at New College (Linacre is mentioned in the prefatory letter in volume 1, and his translation of Proclus De sphaera was published by Aldus in 1499); All Souls had two copies (one now passed to Exeter College), one of which excited Dibdin ('the library of ASC, Oxford, boasts one of which may vie with either [the Heber or Valpy copies]’). The edition did not however sell out: like many other great monuments of Greek printing—the 1488 Homer, the Rome Eustathius, the Eton Chrysostom—it sold very slowly. It was expensive: Amerbach says that he had to pay 12 crowns for it, 6 times what the Bebelius edition cost and one crown less than the great Froben Augustine. Erasmus, who elsewhere says it was difficult to find outside Italy, in 1525 was ordering it with a number of other Aldine texts and the Florentine Homer.

But keimnliou it became and remained, often handsomely bound. The copy of Emeric Bigot (1626-1689) is a fine example (recently in the Norman and Freilich sales; now in a private collection). All the great collectors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, men far different from Chaucer’s poor clerk, were keen to possess a copy: from George III (an earlier Royal Library copy is at Cambridge), Grenville, Cracherode and Renouard to that doyen of bibliophiles, Lord Spencer, whose copy at Althorp was described by Dibdin (Bibliotheca Spenceriana, I, 258) in uncharacteristically subdued language as 'large and magnificent, having many rough edges at the bottom of the leaves, and beautifully bound in red morocco’. It is this magnificent copy which is now offered for sale.

The Greek fonts, with separate characters for accentuation, were based on the calligraphic hand of Immanuel Rhusotas and were cut by Francesco Griffo, who also designed the Aldine italic.