Politianus, Angelus

Super-Chancery folio (300 × 195 cm). Collation: [a–p⁸ q–r¹⁰ s–t⁸ A–I⁸ K⁴ L–P⁸ Q–R¹⁰ S⁸ T¹⁰ V⁶ X–Y¹⁰ Z⁸ &¹⁰ aa¹⁰ iterum aa–iterum bb⁸ bb–hh⁸ ii⁶ kk¹⁰]: 452 leaves, K4 (end of Miscellanea) blank. 38 lines + headline. Types 2:114R, 7:114Gk, and a few words in a Hebrew fount. Initial spaces with printed guide letters. Unrubricated. Marginal dampstaining. 
Nineteenth-century boards, vellum spine. Some worming in the last leaves, but the paper generally fresh.

Goff P-886; Hain 13218*; BMC V 559 (IB.24472); BSB-Ink P-663; Bod-inc P-422 (with detailed contents). See Paolo Veneziani, “Platone Benedetti e la prima edizione degli Opera del Poliziano,” Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 1988, 95-107

Unrubricated. Marginal dampstaining. Nineteenth-century boards, vellum spine. Some worming in the last leaves, but the paper generally fresh.
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First edition, and the first collected edition of a contemporary author. The Florentine Poliziano (1454-1494), legendary among his humanist contemporaries and still today for the breadth and acuity of his Greek and Latin learning, started to organize his many writings into a corpus in the year of his premature death, planning to begin with an edition of his letters. The project was continued by his friend Alessandro Sarti of Bologna, who arranged for printing by Franciscus Plato de Benedictis. But Plato de Benedictis died in August 1496, having just begun on the Epistolae (of which two early sheets survive as binding waste). The project was then taken up by Aldus, a longtime admirer of Poliziano’s scholarship. In his introductory letter Aldus refers to some of the difficulties of gathering the source material: he felt sure that certain Florentines held on to authentic writings by Poliziano, intending to increase their own reputations by plagiarism.
The Psalm quotation in Hebrew characters on H8r was probably not from a fully realized font. It is different from the font found in Aldus’s Rudimenta grammatices latinae linguae, February 1501, which contains a very brief Hebrew grammar.