Commentariorum Libri IIII. In universam Aristotelis Phisicen: nunc recens summa…

8vo (177 × 110 mm), pp. [48], 416. Woodcut title device, headpieces and initials. Early or contemporary annotation throughout, mainly in the form of underlinings and trefoil markers with occasional short notes (one or two words) in Latin. Contemporary blindstamped calf with arabesque decorated ovals on each cover, spine with four raised bands plus a rope-pattern band at head and foot, front and rear enadpapers and pastedowns formed from waste from an earlier book printed in red and black (see note), parchment stiffeners (largely blank), traces of early manuscript titling to the foredge. Rubbed, upper hinge and three cords broken, one still secure, a single wormhole running through both covers and the text block (where it affects a word or two on every page), a larger wormtrack to the lower cover affecting both the leather and the board, some damage to the turn-in on the lower cover. Numerous early pen tests (mainly Latin) to the title and endpaper, the name ‘John Freeman’ transliterated in Greek characters and a price of 4 shillings, another inscription to the upper forecorner torn away with some loss of blank paper. A fair, unsophisticated copy and an interesting binding example.

Velcurio’s popular textbook of Aristotelian physics, printed at Lyon by Louis Cloquemin and Étienne Michel, here with an early English binding and provenance.

Johannes Velcurio or Johannes Bernhardi of Feldkirch (1490-1534) was professor of rhetoric and physics at the university of Wittenberg, where he was a humanist colleague of Melanchthon. This posthumously published Commentarium on Aristotle’s physics first appeared in Tubingen in 1542 and ran to at least twenty five editions before 1595, including those from in Basel, Erfurt, Cologne, Tübingen, Strasbourg, Wittenberg, Lyon, and London. The fourth book is devoted to Aristotle’s De anima. In England, as elsewhere it was used as a university textbook and appears, for example, among the small textbooks purchased by students at Cambridge (see P. Gaskell, Books bought by Whitgift’s Pupils in the 1570s, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 7, 3 (1979), pp. 284-293). It is unclear who the ‘John Freeman’ who inscribed the title-page in Greek at an early date was, but several John Freemans appear in the Cambridge University registers in the last years of the sixteenth century.

The binding bears identical blindstamped centrepiece tools to a contemporary London binding illustrated by David Pearson in English Bookbinding Styles 1450-1800 as Fig 3.35 (BL 1492.f.43, Selneccer, Evangeliorum et epistolarum dominicalium, Frankfurt, 1575) with similar spine bands and blind-ruled borders. At the front and rear are two endleaves (each) using waste apparently from an unidentified edition of Justinian’s Institutes, each with further early notes (mainly pen tests).