Hebrew Pentateuch, Paris: Robertus Stephanus, 1546

358 folios (4 1/2 x 3 in.; 115 x 76 mm); margins ruled in brown; neat marginal annotations in brown ink. Woodcut title and head-pieces. Some marginal spotting. Grolieresque binding in full brown calf; roll-tooled frames in gilt, white, black, and green; spines richly gilt-stamped; all edges gilt with stamped design; upper joint split but holding; corners bumped. 

Robert I Estienne’s commitment to the production of beautiful Hebrew books is evident in the quality of the paper and fonts he used. After finding the existing Hebrew type available to him in Paris unsatisfactory, he hired Jean Arnoul, dit le Picard le jeune, considered one of the most skilled type-cutters of the age, to create new typefaces, which he began using in mid-1543. Estienne also made sure to reproduce the most accurate printed text of the Bible then in circulation, that of Daniel Bomberg’s Second Rabbinic Bible (Venice, 1524-1525). The attractiveness of the present pocket-size volume of Genesis through Leviticus – part of his 1544-1546 sextodecimo edition of the Hebrew Bible – is magnified by both the elegant binding and gilt and gauffered paper edges it sports.

Literature

Elizabeth Armstrong, Robert Estienne, Royal Printer: An Historical Study of the Elder Stephanus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), 51, 119-121.

Hendrik D. L. Vervliet, The Palaeotypography of the French Renaissance: Selected Papers on Sixteenth-Century Typefaces, vol. 1 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2008), 136-144.

Vinograd, Paris 18