GALEN, comm. THRIVERIUS, Jeremias Brachelius, trans. LINACRE, Thomas.

£9,500 · Offered by Sokol Books

Three rare works of commentary on Galen’s De temperamentis and his Ars medica by the Dutch humanist physician Thriverius, in a lovely contemporary Roman binding by the workshop of Marcantonio Guillery, one of the binders responsible for the library of Giovanni Battista Grimaldi (d. 1612), famed bibliophile known for the plaquette bindings on his books depicting Apollo and Pegasus. This copy was bound for its owner, a contemporary medical doctor, whose name is on the cover. This sammelband includes first editions of the second and third works, and a second edition of the first work, first published Louvain 1535. Two of the tools used in the gold-tooling on this binding, the ‘draw handle’ tool and the small ‘three- legged’ tool used for punctuating the titles and name, appear in the list of those used by ‘Binder B’ of Grimaldi’s books, according to Anthony Hobson (Apollo and Pegasus (Amsterdam: 1975), p. 66; see also plate XIX(b)), who identified this binder as Marcantonio Guillery (pp. 86-88). His father was of French origin and moved to Rome as a printer and bookseller in the early sixteenth century. Guillery’s workshop produced almost half of Grimaldi’s ‘Apollo and Pegasus’ bindings. The Latin translations from Galen are by Thomas Linacre (d.1524), English humanist and founder of the College of Physicians in London, each Latin section followed by Thriverius’s commentary. The first work is on temperaments, a typology of the human anatomy in which Galen describes nine mixtures

• Binding: Hardcover

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.