Item #2682 Biblia cum summarioru[m] apparatu pleno quadrupliciq[ue] repertorio insignita. Latin BIBLE.
Biblia cum summarioru[m] apparatu pleno quadrupliciq[ue] repertorio insignita...
Biblia cum summarioru[m] apparatu pleno quadrupliciq[ue] repertorio insignita...
Biblia cum summarioru[m] apparatu pleno quadrupliciq[ue] repertorio insignita...
Biblia cum summarioru[m] apparatu pleno quadrupliciq[ue] repertorio insignita...
Biblia cum summarioru[m] apparatu pleno quadrupliciq[ue] repertorio insignita...
Biblia cum summarioru[m] apparatu pleno quadrupliciq[ue] repertorio insignita...
Portable Bible for large pockets

Biblia cum summarioru[m] apparatu pleno quadrupliciq[ue] repertorio insignita... Lyon: Jacques I Mareschal [for Simon Vincent], 16 October 1519.

8vo (180 x 126 mm). [30], 500, [54] pp. (with pagination errors). Title and first table printed in red and black, text in two columns with printed marginalia, indices and summary in 3 columns. Colophon on fol. RR4v. Publisher’s woodcut device (Baudrier no. 2) on title and final verso, full-page woodcut showing the six days of Creation, within ornamental border, historiated woodcut initials throughout; red paragraph marks to opening page and red highlighting to the facing woodcut. Mainly faint marginal dampstain in upper margins, light discoloration to outer margins. Contemporary Flemish(?) blind-tooled calf over wooden boards, sides with leafy roll-tool border enclosing central panel with intersecting triple fillets forming a saltire design, the compartments filled with a repeated foliate tool arranged symmetrically, one (of two) fore-edge clasps, two catches; many deckle edges preserved (worn, a few small chips to leather, pastedown endpapers renewed). Provenance: early ownership inscriptions on title: Mrr Cornelius Adamus ter Borch; and Siba Lÿken(?); contemporary marginal notes and some text markings (crosses in margins and underlinings) in first few books (Genesis-Deuteronomy); abundant 17th and/or 18th-century philological annotations in Genesis and Exodus and in the indices, including full page of notes on blank page 2E5v.

A complete portable Bible printed in very small types, containing an ample scholarly apparatus and finding aids for the use of theology students and scholars; this copy with contemporary annotations and in a contemporary blind-tooled calf binding, probably Flemish. This compact glossed Bible, densely and economically printed, with no break between the Old and New Testaments, is enlivened by hundreds of historiated woodcut initials from woodcut alphabets designed by Guillaume Leroy, who also designed the six-part full-page woodcut of the Creation. 

Mareschal’s useful “pocket” Bibles were bestsellers, this being the fourth of six octavo editions from his press. They were among the first Bible editions to include a rhyming mnemonic Biblical summary by the minorite friar Franciscus Gothi, in which each four-line verse summarizes a Biblical chapter. Occupying here the final two quires, and called for in the colophon, it is not recorded by Baudrier or Gültlingen. Possibly buyers had the choice of including it or not in their copies. Otherwise the text of Mareschal’s octavo Bibles follows that of the Bible printed in Basel in 1509 by Johann Petri and Froben, using the text edited by the Dominican Alberto Castellano, and supplying for the first time marginal notes citing canon law. The apparatus includes four tables and a glossary of Hebrew names. As in the Petri editions, a six-line commendatory poem by Matthias Sambucellus is printed on the title, here with the first word of the last line incorrectly given as “Omne” instead of “Omine.”

The publisher Simon Vincent belonged to Lyon’s powerful booksellers' guild, the Compagnie des Libraires, whose members helped Mareschal during his early years, impressed by his skill, conscientiousness and sobriety (”a rare trait among printers of this period,” notes Baudrier), qualities which contrasted markedly with those of the printer Michel Topie, whose press Mareschal had acquired in 1512 (Baudrier 11:383).

USTC 145003; Adams B-997; Pettegree & Walsby, French Vernacular Books III: 57271. Darlow & Moule II: 6093 (note); Baudrier, Bibliographie lyonnaise 11: 401 and pp. 380, 397 & 448; Gültlingen, Bibliographie des livres imprimés à Lyon 2:209, no. 56.

Item #2682

Price: $6,500.00