Herbarum ac stirpium historia Leonharti Fuchsii una cũ Græcis, Latinis, & Galicis nominibus. Additis nonnulis hactenus non impreßis. Histoire des plantes de M. Leonhart Fuchsius, avec les noms Grecs, Latins & Frãcoys.
AN UNRECORDED OCTAVO EDITION OF FUCHS,
WITH CONTEMPORARY HANDCOLORING
Paris: Pierre Haultin, 1549.
Octavo (6 5/8” x 4 3/16”, 169mm x 105mm): *8 a-z8 A-I8 K4(–K4) [$4 signed; –*1]. 267 leaves, pp. [16] (title, blank, to the reader, 6pp. Latin index, 7pp. French index) 1-518 (with mispaginations). With a woodcut printer’s device to the title-page and 518 botanical woodcuts integral with the text, all colored in a contemporary hand.
Bound in contemporary calf (rebacked) with a gilt fillet border within a double blind fillet border. On the spine, five raised bands. Title gilt to the second panel, date gilt to tail. Later marbled end-papers. All edges of the text-block glazed brown.
Rebacked. With some wear at the fore-corners and general scuffing to the boards. Title-page soiled and somewhat frayed at the fore-edge. Losses to about 2 dozen leaves from ink burn. Green pigments largely oxidized to brown. Lacking the final leaf (K4, with another woodcut and likely the colophon verso). Some ink corrections to the mispagination, as well as scattered sidelining. Marginal note to p. 442 in an old hand.
Leonhart Fuchs (1501–1566) is one of three men — with Brunfels and Bock, Fuchs being the latest — regarded as the German father of modern botany. For the first 1500 years of the modern era or so, Classical authors (Pliny the Elder, Dioscorides and Galen — the latter two writing in Greek) dominated the study of plants. Just as early atlases build on Ptolemy, so too did the great herbals of the XVc and early XVIc essentially ornament the great three ancient botanists. Brunfels, Bock and Fuchs all used wood-cuts, which could be printed alongside set text from a single forme or even page, to vivify their work. Printing and the Mind of Man calls the first edition “the most celebrated and most beautiful herbal ever published.” When colored (well, and contemporaneously; Stafleu-Cowan notes: “Original coloured copies are rare”) the illustrations could be nearly as useful as the text.
Fuchs organizes the plants alphabetically by their Latin names (the genus Fuchsia is named after him). More than a quarter are non-native to Europe, including imports from Asia and, in particular, the Americas (maize, pumpkin, chilies). In each case the illustrations are markedly accurate, showing not only leaves and flowers but root-systems and occasional inset details. A contemporary hand has colored the illustrations, and the green pigment (verdigris, broadly) has oxidized and in places so toned the paper that the leaf has worn through.
Only about 150 copies of the first edition are known to survived; this smaller version in octavo, which will have been produced to capture the market that couldn’t afford the vast folio, was likely produced in greater numbers but appears not to have survived nearly as well. OCLC records no other examples with the Pierre Haultin imprint; most examples of the 1549 Paris (OCLC records 6) work list Veufve A. Byrkman (i.e., the widow of Arnold Birkman) as publishers and Benoist Prévost as publisher. In the BSB example (“Par la veufue Arnould ByrKman”), whose title-page is, except for the printer’s mark and imprint, the same, the book is quite different (despite having the same indexes). Whereas our Haultin volume has columns of French on each page explaining the qualities and cultivation of the illustrated plant, the widow Birkman’s lacks these.
For Haultin see Renouard’s Répertoire des imprimeurs parisiens 200.
Item #6JLR0052
Price: $18,000