The Aldine Horace of 1527

In a fine 18th century binding

Title Q. Horatii Flacci Poemata omnia. Centimetrum Marii Servii. Annotationes Aldi Manutii Romani in Horatium. Ratio mensuum, quibus Odae eiusdem Poetae tenentur, eodem Aldo authore. Nicolai Peroti libellus eiusdem argumenti. Author HORACE — QUINTUS HORATIUS FLACCUS Printer / Publisher Aldus Manutius [heirs of Aldus Manutius and Andrea Torresani] Place of Publication Venice Edition 4th Aldine edition Format 8vo Binding Bound in eighteenth-century mottled calf, the covers with a gilt double fillet; spine gilt in six compartments, each with a central fleuron within a lozenge and rolled at the bands, red morocco lettering-piece in the second compartment, the fourth lettered in gilt direct; edges stained red; green silk marker. Collation [8], 189, [3] leaves. Signatures A⁸ a–z⁸ &⁸, the final leaf blank. Aldine anchor-and-dolphin device on the title. Italic, roman and Greek types. References Dibdin II, 89-90; Adams H-869. Date 1527 Dimensions approx. 155 × 95 mm Condition Rubbed overall, with wear to the joints and corners and loss to the leather at the head of the spine. Title leaf soiled and laid down, with a closed tear and small paper repair passing through the device; annotations and marginalia, sometimes careless, in a later (17th or 18th century) hand, including occasional initials over guide-letters with offsetting; small chips and tears to edges of several leaves; scattered staining and light damp-marking to the text; a sound, honest copy in an old binding.

A reissue of the 1519 edition which is, “in the opinion of Mitscherlich, the most excellent and accurate. The edition of 1527 is a copy of theat of 1519; and so faithful is the copy, that the omission of the first two verses in the sixth ode of the second book is observable in both” (Dibdin).

Aldus Manutius had been dead twelve years when this Horace appeared, and yet his name stands twice on the title page — as annotator, and as author of the Ratio mensuum on the Horatian metres — with his anchor beneath. The press was then in the hands of his father-in-law Andrea Torresani and Torresani’s sons, who ran it from Aldus’s death in 1515 until Paulus Manutius took up his father’s business in 1533; this edition was seen through the press by Francesco Torresani, whose name appears in the preface, and includes the life of Horace by Pietro Crinito.

The volume is thus a document of the Aldine afterlife: the founder’s texts, the founder’s scholarship and the founder’s device, issued by the family that inherited them. Aldus’s metrical work on Horace, first printed in his lifetime and reprinted here, was among the earliest systematic treatments of the Odes’ lyric measures to reach a wide readership, and it is joined in this edition by Servius on the hundred metres and by Perotti’s tract on the same question — a small working library of Horatian prosody bound into a pocket octavo.

The lettering-piece and the title page do not agree. The spine is lettered with the date 1501; the title page is dated M.D.XXVII, and the book is the Aldine Horace of 1527. The Horace of 1501 was the second of Aldus’s italic octavo classics, following the Virgil by a month, and was issued as a bare text without apparatus; the annotations, the Ratio mensuum, the Servius and the Perotti advertised on the present title belong to the later Aldine Horaces and cannot appear in a copy of 1501. The spine date is an error — a binder’s or an owner’s — and is described here so that it may not become anyone else’s.

$2,000

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