Psalterium, Venice: Daniel Bomberg and Petrus Liechtenstein, 1515

The first title issued by the celebrated Hebrew printer of Venice.

Daniel Bomberg of Antwerp was the first printer of Hebrew books in Venice and the first Gentile printer of Hebrew titles anywhere. His numerous later accomplishments included the first edition of the Babylonian Talmud (1519/1520-1523), the first edition of the Jerusalem Talmud (1522-1524), and the first three editions of the Rabbinic Bible (1517, 1524-1525, 1546-1548). By the time his press ceased operations in 1548-1549, it had published more than two hundred titles. The present work was printed at the press of Petrus Liechtenstein of Cologne, as Bomberg did not yet have a privilege to publish, and translated into Latin by Felix Pratensis, future editor of Bomberg’s First Rabbinic Bible (1517). It is bound together with a series of Latin elegiac poems after the biblical prophets Joel, Amos, and Jonah, as well as the Capita pietatis et religionis Christianae, composed by Johannes Fux and published in Augsburg ca. 1553 by Philip Ulhart the Elder (59ff.).

Provenance

T. Connolly, Bookseller, 10, Up. Ormond Quay, Dublin (paper ticket on pastedown of upper board)

Arthuri/Arthvri Smith (ex libris on pastedown of upper board)

Physical Description

66 folios (7 7/8 x 5 3/4 in.; 201 x 145 mm) (foliation: [ii], 64) on paper; Latin text with some Hebrew words in margins; Hebrew alphabet in margins of Ps. 119 (ff. 53r-56r); intermittent underlining, Latin marginalia, and strikethroughs in pen and pencil (see, e.g., ff. 1v, 12v-13r, 17v, 29v, 34r, 49r, 63v). Title page printed in black and red ink; four woodcut initials on the first three leaves, one historiated; initial letter of each verse in red ink. Slight scattered staining and dampstaining; episodic dog-earing. Nineteenth-century(?) three-quarters leather over marbled boards, scratched and worn along edges and on spine; headband partially exposed; spine in five compartments with raised bands, titles and date lettered in gilt in two of them; remnants of gilding to paper edges; nineteenth-century(?) marbled paper flyleaves and pastedowns.

Literature

A.M. Habermann, Ha-madpis daniyyel bombirgi u-reshimat sifrei beit defuso (Safed: The Museum of Printing Art, 1978), 27 (no. 1).

Marvin J. Heller, The Sixteenth Century Hebrew Book: An Abridged Thesaurus, vol. 1 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2004), 80-81.

Alexander Marx, “Notes on the Use of Hebrew Type in Non-Hebrew Books, 1475-1520,” in Studies in Jewish History and Booklore (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1944), 296-345, at p. 310.

Israel Mehlman, “Beit defuso shel daniyyel bomberg be-venetsi’ah,” Areshet 3 (1961): 93-98, at pp. 93-96.

Bruce E. Nielsen, “Daniel van Bombergen, a Bookman of Two Worlds,” in Joseph R. Hacker and Adam Shear (eds.), The Hebrew Book in Early Modern Italy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 56-75.

Angelo M. Piattelli, “New Documents Concerning Bomberg’s Printing of the Talmud,” in Shmuel Glick, Evelyn M. Cohen, and Angelo M. Piattelli (eds.), Meḥevah le-Menaḥem: Studies in Honor of Menahem Hayyim Schmelzer (Jerusalem: JTS; Schocken Institute for Jewish Research, 2019), 171-199.

Vinograd, Venice 3h

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Amos_propheta/v9zxjU8q5mcC?hl=en&gbpv=1