REISCH, Gregor. (with) SÜNZEL, Friedrich.

£37,500 · Offered by Sokol Books

Superb sammelband in lovely contemporary binding containing the third genuine edition of the Carthusian monk Gregor Reisch s sumptuously illustrated post-incunabulum textbook and encyclopaedia, featuring a folding Ptolemaic world map, and the incunable first edition of Friedrich Sünzel's commentaries on Aristotle s Physics. After the present edition the map was reduced. Almost all the woodcuts were reused, though the title-page illustration here is new, as are the small woodcuts on q5v and C6v depicting a man using a Jacob's Staff and a group of men and women bathing in a mineral spring. The diagram with cross-section of the eye is the oldest printed illustration of the structure of the eye (Ludwig Choulant, History and Bibliography of Anatomic Illustration (Chicago: 1920), p. 80). The final laudatory poem describes the work as a cyclopedia, probably an early instance of the word (Fairfax Murray, p. 571), and quite possibly its earliest appearance in print, while the Sünzel is supposed to contain the first printed instance of the term incunabulum ( cunabulis ) to describe a book, on a1r, line 10 (see ms. note to GW entry, derived from Gilhofer and Rauschenberg Catalogue 72 (Lucerne: 1977), no. 17). The map depicts the world according to Ptolemaic geography, with Europe and Africa to the West and India and China to the East. At the southeast corner, a caption across the traditional land bridge joining Africa to Asia acknowledges that the ancient concept described by Ptolemy wa

• Binding: Hardcover

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