Bound for Cardinal Boncompagni
ALFONSO, Vincenzo.
Prima centuria dele lettre [sic] … Naples, Giovanni Domenico Montanaro, 1634.
8vo, pp. 182, [2]; woodcut ornament to title-page; light damp-stain to final few leaves, though a very good copy; bound in contemporary (Roman or Neapolitan) vellum richly gilt with the arms of Cardinal Boncompagni, flat spine with gilt decoration and manuscript lettering, edges gilt, remains of ties; binding very slightly creased with small chip to gilding on front cover, a few tiny wormholes in endpapers, upper hinge breaking; the one erratum (p. 58) corrected by hand, eighteenth-century armorial ink stamp of the Boncompagni family library to title and their manuscript shelfmark to opposite page, book labels of Paul Menso and Charles van der Elst, modern bookplate of J.-J.'S.
Dedication copy of an extremely rare Neapolitan printing in a fine vellum gilt binding made for the dedicatee, Cardinal Francesco Boncompagni.
Vincenzo Alfonso was a doctor of theology and of both civil and canon law from Palermo; this was his only published work. The letters are addressed to princes and kings, abbots and Jesuits, some famous, some less so, many of them from Naples or Sicily. The letters are numbered from one to one hundred, though there is a final, much longer, unnumbered letter addressed to the Jesuit Mario Fontanarosa.
‘And thus the book, which on its own would have been buried in the boxes and the dust of the bookseller, by reason of [Boncompagni’s] patronage should earn its place and its life, at least for a short time, in the hands and eyes of I who read it’ (dedicatory letter, pp. 4–5, trans.).
A second collection of letters was never published.
Provenance:
1. Cardinal Francesco Boncompagni (1592–1641), the dedicatee, bishop of Naples from 1626 and a nephew of Pope Gergory XIII; he was a notable collector of books, coins and medals.
2. Paul Menso (1876–1957).
3. Charles van der Elst (1904–1982), Belgian bibliophile.
Extremely rare: we have found just one other copy, in Cambridge University Library (from the library of Lord Acton, whose grandfather held high office at the Neapolitan court in the late eighteenth century). There are no copies recorded in ICCU SBN.
USTC 1755072.