Cicero in Bohemia
CICERO, Marcus Tullius.
De philosophia tomus primus. Lyon, Sébastien Gryphe, 1546.
16mo, pp. 621, [5 (blank)]; woodcut printer’s device to title-page, woodcut initials, text in italics; title-page a little dusty with show-through from inscriptions, a good copy; bound in contemporary French calf gilt, lower cover with gilt centrepiece within a double border of triple blind fillets and corner gilt fleurons, spine with small gilt floral or foliate tool in each compartment, edges gilt and gauffered to a swirling leaf and bunch of grapes design; lacking upper cover, lower joint cracked, old repairs to joints; seventeenth-century ownership inscription of Joannes Lebe (?of Adorf) to title-page, gift inscription from Christoph Gladisch of Aich in 1703 and ownership inscription of the Piarist College of Schlackenwerth to title-page (see below).
A small format Lyon edition of Cicero, in a contemporary calf gilt binding made in Lyon (or Paris), with later Bohemian ownership. This is one of numerous editions of classical texts printed by the prolific Sébastien Gryphe of Lyon, which were to be found in libraries across Europe, including some of the most renowned collections of the time. Gryphe printed eight volumes of Cicero’s works in this small format in 1546 (von Gültlingen V: 919–926).
The style of binding is French, and the tools are found on other books printed in both France and elsewhere, including volumes from the library of the Augsburg banker and collector Marcus Fugger (1529–1597), who owned numerous small format Lyon imprints from this time, and the unidentified A.S., who owned more elaborate bindings using some of the same tools (Foot, Henry Davis Gift III, no. 53). The gauffered edges, with their distinctive pointillé pattern of swirling leaves and pointed fruit (bunches of grapes?), seem to indicate a possible Lyon origin for the binding; similar gauffering can be seen on a Lyon panel-stamped binding on a 1547 Gryphe imprint (Bibliotheca Brookeriana, sale, part V, Sotheby’s, 10 December 2024, lot 1087), and on a Lyon panel-stamped binding made for Benoît le Court (Bibliotheca Brookeriana, sale, part I, Sotheby’s, 11 October 2023, lot 55).
Provenance:
1. Joannes Lebe, probably of Adorf, Saxony, close to the Czech border.
2. The book was bequeathed by Christoph Gladisch of Aich (modern Doubí, in Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic) in 1703 to the library of the Piarist College of Schlackenwerth (modern Ostrov in the same part of the Czech Republic), founded in 1666, whose library was sold in 1910.
USTC 149561; von Gültlingen V: 923.