Gall (1472) Sold at Auction Prices

SALOMO III, Bishop of Constance (891-920) and Abbot of St. Gall, attributed to. Glossae ex illustrissimis auctoribus collectae. [Augsburg: Monastery of SS. Ulrich and Afra, ca 1474]. Royal 2υo (402 x 268 mm). Collation: [1υ1υ2 2-14υ1υ0 15υ8 16-28υ1υ0 29υ8] blank, 1/2r preface and text, 24/9v blank,r part II). 287 leaves (of 288, lacking first blank). 55 lines, double column. Type: 1:105R. 12-line woodcut white-vine capitals; spaces for 2-line initials and for one 13-line initial on. Printed paragraph marks. Leaves 2/5 and 2/6 disjunct as usual (one or the other a cancel), the stubs preserved. (First leaf with old repair in lower margin and with old slip over early ownership inscription in upper margin with mostly pale stain extending for first 20 leaves, 28/6 with pale stain, small stains on fore-margin from fol. 139 to end, small mostly marginal wormholes in last thirty leaves touching a few letters, generally very crisp and fresh.) 17th-century German half pigskin, mottled paper boards. Provenance: monastic armorial bookplate of an abbot with initials B.A.Z.W; Geh. Justiz-Rath (...) Barnheim, of Insterburg, East Prussia (name in ink on first text leaf); George and David Wolfe Bruce (bookplate; donated to the Grolier Club in 1894 and sold 15 November 1968); acquired from Goodspeed's Book Shop, 1969. FIRST AND ONLY 15TH-CENTURY EDITION. A compendium of Latin glossaries in two sequential alphabets, based principally on the Liber glossarum and the Abavus maior, the text was widely copied from the 12th century in the southern German-speaking regions. Its misattribution to the 9th-century Bishop of Constance and Abbot of St. Gall dates from at least the 12th century; in the earliest manuscript known Solomon is cited, however, as the initiator of the work rather than its author (Verfasserlexikon 2, 10:542-3). The British Library's second copy is bound in two volumes which were accidentally separated, leading Proctor to mistake the second volume for a separate edition of an anonymous Vocabularius Latinus (Pr. 1638). The striking and unusual set of woodcut capitals, first used in this edition, is thought to have been based on the initials in the St. Gall manuscript used as copy-text for the edition (cf. BMC, II, p. 338). Ludwig Hohenwang and following him Johann Bämler subsequently acquired the blocks. HC 14134*; BMC II, 340 (IC. 5767-8); CIBN S-52; Harvard/Walsh 554; Curt Bühler, "Remarks on the Printing of the Augsburg edition (c. 1474) of Bishop Salomon's Glossae," in Homage to a Bookman: Essays on Manuscripts, Books and Printing written for H. P. Kraus (Berlin 1967), 133-35; Goff S-21.