[ALCHEMY]

£150,000 · Offered by Sokol Books

‘Wer rechten Alchomey’, an exceptionally rare alchemical text in Low German with twenty-eight illustrations of early scientific equipment, together with two related works including a version of the Buch ysaac semys sun von Babilon, manuscript on paper. Provenance: Written and decorated, perhaps by the author (see below), for use in practical alchemical experiments, in northern Germany (note use of ‘vl’ spellings for the more common High German ‘fl’) in the middle of the fifteenth century. To this the original hand, and other later hands over the next century or so, added notes of chants and other alchemical snippets to the first leaf and blank verso of last and to the border of fol. 47r, including the phrase “Parturiunt Montes, nascetur Ridiculus mus” (a line from a fable of the first-century Latin author Phaedrus, alluding to a farcical story in which a mountain appeared to go into labour with loud groans, and a mouse emerged from its foot as an apparent miracle birth). Almost certainly owned by Emanuel Mai (1812-97), bookseller of Berlin: see his catalogue for 1854, vol. I, no. 276 (there recorded with “48 Blatter mit roth und schwartz gemalten Figuren” with a record of the same second text as here, correctly giving that text’s Low German spellings (note that in a slight garbling of detail, Mai lists the second text as beginning on “pag. 47” but it is in fact on fol. 46v – opposite the leaf numbered ‘47’). Recently re-emerging in a private co

• Binding: Hardcover

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