Boethius | De consolatione philosophiae, Venice, 1489, Paduan half morocco over wooden boards

Boethius.

De consolatione philosophiae (with commentary ascribed in the text to Thomas Aquinas). Pseudo-Boethius: De disciplina scholarium (commentary by pseudo- Thomas Aquinas). Venice: [Bonetus Locatellus for] Octavianus Scotus, 24 December 1489

Chancery folio (312 x 213 mm), 102 leaves, a-m⁸ n⁶, double column, 65 lines plus headline, gothic type, initial spaces with printed guides, woodcut printer's device at end, early annotations throughout in two different hands with manicules, contemporary Paduan blind-stamped half morocco (originally dyed pink?) over wooden boards, stubs from four pairs of clasps, remains of paper labels on spine and on lower cover, two flyleaves from a fourteenth-century Italian manuscript, a few deckle edges, some marginal staining, binding somewhat rubbed, edges chipped, spine defective, hinges broken, some small wormholes in binding and at head of first few leaves

An unrestored copy in a contemporary binding. Unusually, the binding has a manuscript title on the lower cover rather than the upper cover, and seems to have been lettered both directly onto the wooden board and on a paper label covering that earlier title. Additionally, the printed book contains an end-title on the final verso which gives more information than the first page, which merely states the name of the author.

The first owner of this volume also bought a copy of Scotus's edition of Andreae on Aristotle's Metaphysics (now in the Biblioteca nazionale centrale in Rome; MEI records his name as possibly Mactiolus da Pyro).

The binding is from a Paduan workshop active towards the end of the fifteenth century, which also made bindings for Johann Protzer, a German student who assembled a substantial library while he was at the university of Padua in the 1490s. He owned a copy of this 1489 Venice Boethius, in a binding with this same binding stamp, though bound together with another work (Anthony Hobson, “A German student in Italy: his books and bindings”, in Mélanges d’histoire de la reliure offert à Georges Colin (Brussels, 1998), 87-99, p. 93, item 30). The similarity between this and volumes bound for Protzer is remarkable, with regard to the shape of the wooden boards, the clasps, the tooling, and even the offsetting of colour from the turn-ins of the leather. Protzer also wrote the author's name on the cover of his books, often on a paper label; the label on this volume is unfortunately too worn for any connection to be made. The binding stamp is illustrated by Hobson (p. 97, stamp 8).

The flyleaves are from a fourteenth-century Italian manuscript of Petrus Hispanus, Summule logicales; the decorated initial R on the lower flyleaf starts the section "De reductione generali".

There is a stain towards the end of the volume (visible on the last leaf and the rear manuscript flyleaf) which looks to have been made by a pair of contemporary spectacles; similar stains have been found in other books from around this time, for example in a copy of Luis de Granada in the Harry Ransom Center in Texas.

REFERENCES: ISTC ib00786000

PROVENANCE: "Iste liber est ad usum mei Fratris Mathei dapyro quae emi pretio 23 solidorum Venetiis 1491 de mense Septembris 2", bought in Venice on 2 September 1491 for 23 solidi; Sotheby's, 22 July 1968, lot 354, £130, to Francis Edwards