ELEGANTLY BOUND

[Opera] C. Corn. Tacitus ex I. Lipsii editione cum not. et emend. H. Grotii [– Historiarum libri quinque et alia ejusdem quae extant].

Leiden, Elzevir, 1640.

One vol. in 4, 12mo, pp. i: [16], 218, ii: 219-400, iii: [401]-560, iv: 561-746, [16], [2 (blank)]; with folding letterpress table Stemma Augustae domus after p. 400, woodcut initials and ornaments, copper-engraved title and portrait (bound as *1.8), bound without the second final blank; very occasional minimal spotting, tear to table (subtly repaired); nonetheless an excellent set in early nineteenth-century blue straight-grained morocco, borders and spines ruled in gilt, spines lettered directly, board-edges and turn-ins roll-tooled in gilt, edges gilt, marbled endpapers, ribbon page-markers, sewn on 3 sunken cords; shelfmark and collation note initialled ‘S.H.’ and dated to 1820 to rear endpaper of vol. I, early nineteenth-century bookplate with initials ‘F.M.’ to upper pastedowns, twentieth-century private collector’s bookplate to front free endpaper of vol. I.

£500

Approximately:
US $617€576

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[Opera] C. Corn. Tacitus ex I. Lipsii editione cum not. et emend. H. Grotii [– Historiarum libri quinque et alia ejusdem quae extant].

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First edition with Grotius’s notes, elegantly bound in early nineteenth-century English morocco. Elzevir had published an edition of Lipsius’s Tacitus in 1634; Dibdin notes ‘Of these elegant little editions [of 1634 and 1640], that of 1640 is preferred, on account of its having the notes of Grotius. It is one of the scarcest of the Elzevir classics.’

Dibdin II, p. 452; Graesse VI, pt ii, p. 9 (‘édition jolie très estimée’); Willems 509.

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