Tea, Coffee, Chocolate, and Tobacco
PECHLIN, Johann Nicolas.
Theophilus bibaculus, sive de potu theae dialogus. Kiel & Frankfurt, for Johann Sebastian Riechel, 1684.
4to, pp. [viii], 103, [1 (blank)]; typographic headpiece; slightly browned with light stains to final leaves, title a little dust-stained, but a very good copy; bound in modern paste paper boards, printed label to spine (chipped); near-contemporary annotations in an Italian hand to c. 52 pp., modern bookplate of Marcus Crahan to front pastedown.
Scarce first edition of Pechlin’s dialogue on tea and its medicinal purposes, with annotations mentioning coffee, chocolate, and tobacco.
The Dutch physician Johann Nicolas Pechlin (1644/46–1706) studied first in his native Leiden and then in several Italian universities, before settling in Kiel in 1648 as Professor of Medicine at the University and a courtier to the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp. The preface to his treatise on tea suggests an interest principally in assessing claims of its medicinal properties, but the work – in the form of a dialogue at dinner between an old man, the sceptical Capito, and a younger proponent of tea, Vindicianus – in fact wanders widely, discussing the habits of both ancient and modern cultures, citing Bartholin, Culpeper, Dodoens, and others, comparing many other herbs and spices both from the New World and the Old (among them pistachios, corn, vanilla, cinnamon, sumac, and more), and including lengthy neo-Latin poems on tea.
Our copy’s early Italian annotator shows a close reading of the text, providing short marginal summaries and picking out in particular mentions of chocolate, coffee, and tobacco. One note observes that ‘the English drink their tea full of sugar’ (‘Angli Sachari satam Theam bibunt […]’, p. 59).
Provenance:
Marcus Crahan, collector of gastronomic books and author of One Hundred Sixteen Uncommon Books on Food and Drink (1997); his first sale, Marcus and Elizabeth Crahan Collection of Books on Food, Drink, and Related Subjects, Sotheby’s, New York, 9–10 October 1984, lot 190.
Vicaire, col. 668; Wellcome IV, p. 325; not in Simon.