FIGHTING FIRES, DAY OR NIGHT
BOUND IN MUSICAL MANUSCRIPT AND HEBREW PRINTED WASTE
[FIREFIGHTING.]
Verneuerte Feuer-Ordnung / Eines edlen ehrenvesten Rahts allhie zi Nürnberg / wie es zur Zeit / wann bey Tag oder Nacht / Feuer in der Stadt auskommt / in allen Dingen solle gehalten warden. Darbe nauch mit angehenget ist / wo / und an welchen Orten man allen darzu gehörigen Zeug finden soll.
Nuremberg, Michael Endter, 1656.
8vo, ff. [71], [1 (blank)]; woodcut arms of the city of Nuremberg to title, typographic headpieces, printed in multiple gothic typefaces; occasional light spotting, nevertheless a very good copy; in a contemporary binding of manuscript waste over boards, using a fifteenth-century German missal fragment on vellum, with Hufnagelschrift notation on 4-line red staves, lined with sixteenth-century Hebrew printed waste (see below), sewn on 3 tawed thongs laced in; extra-illustrated with a contemporary copper-engraved portrait of Johann Wilhelm Kress von Kressenstein tipped in after C6.
Added to your basket:
Verneuerte Feuer-Ordnung / Eines edlen ehrenvesten Rahts allhie zi Nürnberg / wie es zur Zeit / wann bey Tag oder Nacht / Feuer in der Stadt auskommt / in allen Dingen solle gehalten warden. Darbe nauch mit angehenget ist / wo / und an welchen Orten man allen darzu gehörigen Zeug finden soll.
Scarce expanded edition of this guide to preventing and mitigating fires in Nuremberg, bound using a musical manuscript fragment and Hebrew printed waste.
Nuremberg’s Verneuerte Feuer-Ordnung provides information from the city council on, inter alia, preventing emergency water supplies from freezing during winter, the creation of municipal fire-wagons, the recruitment of craftsmen such as coppersmiths and stonemasons in the production of fire safety equipment, procedures for combatting multiple fires simultaneously, and maintenance of fire equipment.
The following two-thirds of the work lists inventories of buckets, ladders, water pumps, and other fire safety equipment in the possession of notable individuals in Nuremberg and in various districts and buildings within the city, beginning with, ‘namely, the three chief captains’. The first of these is Johann Wilhelm Kress von Kressenstein (1589–1657/8), municipal head of Nuremberg, in possession of twenty buckets, two fire pumps, twelve torches, and two screws (i.e. for the nozzle of the fire pumps?), and equally impressive resources at the ‘old Kress house by the fruit market’ (C7r, trans.). Here, a 1655 copper-engraving of Kress by the Nuremberg engraver Andreas Khol (1624–1656) has been inserted into our copy at an early date, perhaps indicating the ownership of a grateful local.
The publisher Michael Endter (1613–1682) was the successor of the Endter printing house and son of Georg Endter the Younger; the Offizin Endter would remain in operation until 1854 (Benzing, p. 365). Over a dozen of Endter’s publications in the 1650s were illustrated with engravings by Khol.
Binding:
Our copy has been bound with a fifteenth-century manuscript fragment comprising Tu domine universorum and Filiae Sion currite, for the dedication of a church. Beneath it is printed Hebrew waste from a copy of Elias Hutter’s Liber psalmorum et Danielis (Hamburg, Ernst Jandeck, 1588), comprising Daniel 2:49–3:4 from B2r (with the signature and catchword נבוכד[נצר] visible beneath the vellum on the upper board). Hutter’s Liber psalmorum makes use of his distinctive Hebrew types, designed as a grammatical aid for students of Hebrew and developed only a year earlier for his Hamburg-printed Hebrew Bible: the root letters are printed in thick type, and inflectional letters in his highly innovative hollow type.
We find a single copy outside of Germany, at the British Library. No copies traced in the US. Other fire protocols were published in Nuremberg in 1596, 1616, and 1698 (the last also printed by Endter).
BM STC German III N422; USTC 2605214; VD17 29:735748D. For Hutter’s Liber psalmorum et Danielis, see USTC 661377; VD16 B-3112.
