THE BEST AND FIRST CRITICAL EDITION OF THE GREEK FLORILEGIUM

Εκλογαι αποϕθεγματων και υποθηκων … Sententie ex thesauris Graecorum delectae … a C. Gesnero … traductae.

Basel, Johann Oporinus for Christoph Froschauer, August 1549.

Folio, pp. [xx], ‘630’ [recte 632], [32]; printed in Greek and Latin text in parallel columns throughout, with shoulder-notes, historiated woodcut initials; very light traces of dampstaining to title, the outer margin of the initial leaves and the final leaf, else very clean and crisp, a very good copy in contemporary vellum over wooden boards, gilt red morocco lettering-piece to spine and the remains of a paper library label at foot; contemporary ownership inscriptions on the title, one cropped in the upper margin, with the surviving motto ‘Rien trop’, and another in Latin, still sixteenth-century, ‘Ad Anselmum Demazechiis pertinet’ (?Anselmo Mazechi), further inscription (Girardet, canon) dated 1771 on the upper pastedown.

£1750

Approximately:
US $2207€2042

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Second, ‘in every respect preferable’ (Dibdin) edition of Gesner’s Stobaeus, acclaimed as ‘the first critical impression of the text of the Florilegium’ (ibid.), philologically and critically much superior to the first, published in 1543. Gesner’s parallel printing of the Greek text and the Latin translation of Stobaeus’s excerpts from hundred of Greek writings – an invaluable source for texts many otherwise lost – was a key and lasting achievement of humanist philology.

Adams S-1873; Dibdin II, 429; Hoffmann III, 632 ff.

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