A VERY LATE MEDIEVAL BINDING
OVID; [Philipp GUNDEL, editor].
Fastorum libri sex diligentissime recogniti. Addito calendario Romano venerandae vetustatis, nunquam antea impresso.
[(Colophon:) Vienna, Hieronymus Vietor and Johann Singriener for Leonhard Alantsee, 3 October 1513.]
[Bound with:]
—. De tristibus libri quinque denuo revisi. [(Colophon:) Vienna, Hieronymus Vietor and Johann Singriener for Leonhard & Lukas Alantsee, 22 October 1513.]
Two works in one vol., 4to, Fasti: pp. [xvi], 167, [1 (blank)], Tristia: pp. [120] (of 128); Fasti: a8, 2a-k8/8/8/4/4, l8, m4, n8, Tristia: A-H8/6, I8, bound without C3-6; woodcut initials, full-page armorial woodcut to I8v; stains to pp. [x-xi] and occasional light marks elsewhere, paperflaw to upper margins of l4 and l6, very small wormhole to upper margin of first 4 leaves, but generally bright, clean copies; bound in late seventeenth- or eighteenth-century sheep-backed bevelled wooden boards, sides two-thirds covered and roll-tooled in blind, spine gilt in compartments with gilt red morocco lettering-piece, recesses to fore-edge for clasps, endbands woven in blue and white; slight worming to leather, very small chip to tailcap; early ink marginal and interlinear annotations and reading marks to approx. 27 pp., modern booklabel to front pastedown.
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Fastorum libri sex diligentissime recogniti. Addito calendario Romano venerandae vetustatis, nunquam antea impresso.
First and only editions, very rare, of two post-incunable Ovid recensions by Philipp Gundel, curiously bound in a strikingly archaic likely eighteenth-century binding.
The 1513 Fasti and Tristia are among the earliest works of the young Philipp Gundel (1493–1567), subsequently Professor of Poetry and Rhetoric at Vienna from 1518, of Law at Krakow from 1521, and later a Minister at the Austrian court. Alongside an Ars amatoria edited by Joachim Vadian and a De Ponto by Ludwig Restio, and a Heroides by Sebastian Winderl, the Gundel’s editions form an ambitious project to print Ovid’s works, newly edited by humanist scholars at the University of Vienna and published across 1512 and 1513 by the brothers Leonhard and Lukas Alantsee (d. 1518 and 1523). Probably born in Augsburg, the Alantsees established themselves as the leading booksellers in Vienna, notable for engaging not only local printers (as here) but also printers as far afield as Basel, Nuremburg, Strasbourg, and Venice.
The binding of the present copies, with thick wooden boards bevelled on the inside and partially covered with leather, simply roll-tooled in blind, shows a striking consistency with the bindings of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries; the tooling of the spine, however – alongside the five thin sewing supports with a long tail, the plough-cut edges, the endpaper construction, and the pronounced rounding – reveal it to be a binding of the late seventeenth or eighteenth century. This is likely evidence of a remarkable continuity of binding practices within monastic libraries, tempered by stylistic influences from the secular world.
OCLC records one copy of the Fasti in North America, at Yale, and none of the Tristia; no copy of either work traced in the UK.
USTC 688827 and 2215725; VD16 O-1607 (Berlin, Budapest, Freiburg, and Vienna) and O-1689 (Berlin only); Denis 95 (Fasti only); Graesse, Trésor V, pp. 78-79; see also Denis, Wiens Buchdruckergeschichte bis 1560, pp. xix-xxii. Not in Adams; not in Brunet; not in Dibdin, Introduction; Tristia not in Denis.
