Andreae Vesalii bruxellensis icones anatomicae
VESALIUS’S LAST GASP
Munich: the Bremer Press (Willy Wiegand) for the New York Academy of Medicine and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Library, 1934 [1935]. Limited edition, no. 129 of 615, of a total edition of 725.
Folio (21 ½” x 15 ¼”, 545mm x 387mm): 188 leaves. With the English translation of the “Ad lectorem,” “To the reader” (issued 1936) laid in.
Bound in the publisher’s half pigskin over grey boards by Frieda Thiersch (with her stamp to the rear paste-down). Title and arms of Vesalius (three weasels rampant) gilt to the front board. On the spine, seven raised bands. Title gilt to morocco in the second panel. Date gilt to the tail. All edges of the text-block untrimmed.
Soiling to the tail, and bumps to the fore-corners, with the odd scuff. A small stain to the front free end-paper, offset to the front paste-down. Small oval book-label of Alfred Ernest Hamill (“EX BIBL. HAMILL” surrounding Chiron playing the aulos) to the front paste-down. Near fine.
Andreas Vesalius (Andries van Wezel, 1514–1564), the father of modern anatomy, was the leading light of the revolution in medicine and surgery that broke finally with Galen and Hippocrates. So celebrated was Vesalius that he was summoned from the court of Philip II of Spain to the bedside of Henri II of France after a lance splinter pierced his eye and brain in 1559, though he was unable to save the French king (or prevent the Wars of Religion). The achievement for which he is most celebrated is his De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (Seven books on the fabric of the human body) published in 1543, along with the abridged Epitome (with two genuinely new woodcuts). The work went into two editions — though the second edition with Vesalius’ annotations for a never-published third edition was sold in February 2024 at public auction to KU Leuven for a staggering $2.228M — and remains one of the most desired books ever to have been published, selling (quite rarely) on the retail market for many hundreds of thousands.
The present volume, published nearly 400 years after the first edition, owes its existence to the repeated loss and discovery of the actual woodblocks used to print the illustrations of Vesalius’ lifetime editions. Dr. Willy Wiegand rediscovered 227 of those original 277 blocks, stored in the attic of the library at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, and with additional support from the New York Academy of Medicine set about to making this de luxe edition — a remarkable feat of time-travel — by inking and printing the surviving original blocks (the remainder supplied photographically) along with a new typesetting of the text and the keys to the diagrams. Sadly, the blocks were destroyed in the bombing of Munich in the Second World War, and so the work must be the last of its kind.
Alfred Ernest Hamill (1856–1957) was a Chicago-born and Yale-educated investment banker. Hamill founded the Centaur Press (whence, doubtless, his assumption of Chiron, the most cultivated of centaurs and teacher of Achilles, as his book-label) and a trustee of the Newberry Library.
Cushing, Vesalius VI.A.-16; Waller 9907; Heirs of Hippocrates 289.
Item #JLR0653
Price: $12,000