A handsome copy, completely unrestored in its contemporary, northern Italian binding, of Boethius' De Consolatione Philosophiae; with copious, characterful evidence of early ownership, including the vivid imprint of its early owner's spectacles.
The ownership inscription on the title page of 'Fratris Mathei Dapyro', Mactiolus de Pyro or Mactiolus Pyranus (MEI) indicates that he purchased this volume only two years after printing, on 2 September 1491, in Venice, for 23 solidi. There is frustratingly little trace of de Pyro aside from a similar purchase note in another volume, Quaestiones super XII libros Metaphysicae Aristotelis (Scotus, 1487), listed on MEI, which indicates that de Pyro was, at least in the early 1490s, buying his books in Venice. However, he and/or another early reader have left evidence of use throughout the volume. Annotations pepper the margins which are both academic and playful; an energetic 'COMETA', or comet, is written in the lower blank margin of l4(r) with what look like drawings of comet tails, beneath discussion of celestial objects in the printed commentary. There are distinctive, long-fingered manicules, with pronounced knuckles, in the margins throughout that wrap around corners of text and span multiple lines.
Most striking of all, however, is the staining left by the same pair of contemporary spectacles at various points in the volume. The impression is most pronounced at the end of the book, where they've evidently been shut between the final leaf and the rear endpaper. It's possible to make out almost the whole frame, with the two circular rims, and the arched, angular bridge between them. Their shape is recognisable from early depictions of eyeglasses in medieval painting and early woodcuts; the first depiction of spectacles in print is in Lucas Brandis Rudimentum Novitiorum (Lubeck: 1475), but they also appear in the Nuremberg Chronicle twenty years later, and, perhaps most famously, a pair is worn by the 'book fool' in Sebastian Brant's famous Narrenschiff, Ship of Fools. 'The first pair of spectacles - two convex glass disks enclosed in metal or bone rims with handles centrally connected by a tight rivet so as to clamp the nostrils or be held before the eyes - was invented around 1286 most likely by a craftsman living at or near Pisa' (Ilardi, 4). By the early sixteenth century, these early so-called 'rivet' spectacles had been largely replaced by nose spectacles, which 'often had a bow-shaped continuous bridge, almost of a modern appearance, that was sometimes flexible depending upon the material, for example leather or whalebone ... Spectacles were still usually held in place with the hand while being used temporarily for a brief period of reading or close inspection' ('The History of Spectacles', British Optical Association Museum [open access]). The fact that they were often made of leather might explain the offsetting here, and given that they weren't yet designed to stay on the nose, might explain why they were put down at various points by the reader of this book, and presumably left at the rear of the volume for a while, given the strength of the impression.
There are only a handful of examples of spectacle impressions like this one that we've found; there is one recorded at the Harry Ransom Centre, one in a Book of Hours at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA 1945-65-14), and Peter Kidd identified another in manuscript MS 9, fols. 6v-7r at Trinity College, Hartford (MSS Provenance blogpost, 3 Dec. 2014 [open access]).
This volume was bound by a workshop active in Padua in the late fifteenth century, named by Anthony Hobson as the 'Scholastic Binder' in his study of the books and bindings of Johann Protzer, a German student at the university of Padua at the end of the fifteenth century. This volume cannot be definitively linked to Protzer himself - particularly as the copy of Boethius listed in BMC (V, 437) is Protzer's copy of this very edition, bound with Cicero, Tusculanae Quaestiones (De Strata, 1491) - but there are strong similarities to the form and look of the books in his collection, down to the tooling, shape of the boards, and presence of a paper label with the author's name pasted one of the boards. The connection does, however, reveal something of the binder, his business and his usual customers. Bindings like this one and those in Protzer's collection, 'blind-tooled leather spines over boards, were the cheapest, other than paper or vellum wrappers, that could be bought, a kind of covering suited to students of limited means. There can be little doubt that the binder in question was based in Padua. [...] his business seems to have been mainly with the student population - the religious houses of the city appear to have shopped elsewhere ... He may have been the beadle, bidello, of the natio Germanica in the University.' (Hobson, p.90). Offsetting from the leather turn-ins suggests that the morocco may have originally been dyed pink; the flyleaves are from a fourteenth-century Italian manuscript of Petrus Hispanus, Summule logicales; the decorated initial R on the lower flyleaf opens “De reductione generali”.
There are several appealing traces of printshop processes and decisions here. One oddity is the title printed on the verso of the final leaf, rather than the first, which gives only the author's name, 'Boethius'. While very early incunabula were often printed with the title at the head of the first leaf of text, without a separate title page, and titles were sometimes found in the colophon, the format of the title as it appears here is unusual. Perhaps it was a deliberate decision by the printer, to fill the blank space at the end of the book with useful information that could be easily referred to while the book lay horizontally on a shelf. It presumably guided the position of the title written in manuscript on the lower board, and the label stuck over the top of it. Elsewhere, there is the impression of bearer type on the final leaf - un-inked type used to hold paper level and in place in the press.
ISTC ib00786000. Hain 3404. BMC V, 437. A Hobson, 'A German student in Italy: his books and bindings', Mélanges d’histoire de la reliure offert à Georges Colin (Brussels, 1998), 87-99; binding tool used here illustrated on p.97, no.8. Vincent Ilardi, Renaissance Vision from Spectacles to Telescopes (Philadelphia, 2007). 'The History of Spectacles', British Optical Association Museum [open access].
