Beschreibung:

SUETONIUS TRANQUILLUS, Caius (75-160). Vitae XII Caesarum . Edited by Joannes Andreae de Buxiis (1417-75), Bishop of Aleria. Rome: Conradus Sweynheym and Arnoldus Pannartz, 17 September 1472. Median 2° (323 x 221 mm). Collation: [1-10 10 11 8 ] (1/1 blank, 1/2r verses by Ausonius, 1/2v table, 1/3r text, 11/7r colophon, 11/7v-11/8 blank). 107 leaves (of 108, without the final blank). 38 lines. Types 2:115R, 115Gk. 7-line spaces for initials, supplied in an eighteenth-century hand. Traces of Hebrew bearer type in initial space on 8/8v. (A few small mostly filled wormholes to first and last few leaves, deleted inkstamps in lower margin of first text leaf, repaired tear to first blank leaf, minor marginal repair to last leaf, some mostly marginal foxing, occasional staining.) Later paper wrappers; modern folding morocco case. Provenance : 16th-century marginalia and interlinear corrections in red and brown ink, many emending the text (marginalia cropped); extensive early note about Suetonius washed from first blank; occasional later marginalia; "Ad usum Angeli... S. Mariae Angelorum...", erased 17th-century ownership inscription at head of first page; 18th-century MS table and later notes washed from verso of first leaf and recto of last leaf respectively; initials and foliation supplied apparently by the same hand. Second Sweynheym and Pannartz edition, a page-for-page reprint of their 1470 edition (Goff S-816) and one of the last works printed by Italy's prototypographers in partnership. This edition omits the letter by the editor, Giovanni Andrea Bussi, that prefaced the 1470 edition, but includes the four poems from Ausonius's Caesares cycle that Bussi had supplied in 1470 by way of providing a summary of Suetonius's content. As a consequence of their inclusion in the editions of Sweynheym and Pannartz, these verses became part of the tradition of Suetonius in print (see also lot 104). The last dozen of the 48 books printed by Sweynheym and Pannartz on their second, Roman press (of 52 editions in all) are notoriously rarer than the first 36, a fact that has not been satisfactorily explained, but may be elucidated by the appeal of 20 March 1472 addressed to the Pope on the printers' behalf by Bussi, Sweynheym and Pannartz's principal editor and later papal librarian. Published in the final volume of their edition of Nicolaus de Lyra's commentary on the Bible (13[20] March 1472), this petition for financial aid famously includes a complete list of the printers' output to that date, thus permitting the identification of several anonymous editions issued in 1465-67 from their first press at Subiaco. It also gives the print-run of each edition (ranging from 275 to 300 copies) and alludes to the excessive numbers of unsold copies that continue to burden the press's shelves. The rarity of subsequent editions may thus be accounted for either by a new policy of issuing smaller print-runs (cf. BMC IV, pp. vii-viii), or less probably, by an overwhelming response from the reading public who would have rallied to the support of the financially strapped duo by purchasing more of these later editions. The present copy offers tantalizing evidence concerning the beginning of printing in Hebrew. On folio 8/8v there is a lightly inked impression of what appear to be two Hebrew characters printed upside-down as bearer type. Their height is the same as the type used to print the first Hebrew book, David Kimhi's Sefer ha-shorashim , printed by Obadiah, Menasseh and Benjamin of Rome (see A.K. Offenberg, "The Earliest Hebrew Printed Books", The British Library OIOC Newsletter , autumn 1993). If the bearer type is in fact Hebrew type and it is the same as the first Hebrew type, this would be hard evidence of a link between the earliest Hebrew printing and Sweynheym and Pannartz; similarities in format have already suggested a link. Only one year previously, in 1471, Bussi had complained of the press having no Hebrew letters, so that this bearer