Hellinga (Wytze Gerbens), 1908-1985; Hellinga (Lotte), born 1932; Reid (D.A.S.), translator

Two volumes (39 × 28 cm), I: xxviii, 267 pp. II: (6), pp.379-505 (2), with 67 text illustrations and 291 plates. Errata slip loosely inserted in volume I. Uniform publisher’s leather-backed boards, printed dust jackets. - “Obligatory not only for specialists in Low Countries printing but for all, librarians, scholars, collectors and bookdealers, who have to do with incunabula. In method it will serve as a model and challenge for studies of fifteenth-century printing in Germany, Italy and France – work that will take several lifetimes, but that must be done, and this is how to do it. And there is no single book more fitted to show the general reader what the typographical study of incunabula is about, with its disciplines and techniques, its rigours, difficulties and triumphs; how it finds evidence, and decides what can and can’t be proved by that evidence; and how, which is perhaps the deepest root of its fascination, it has continual reference to human creatures, at work five centuries ago in society and time, and still vividly living through their artefacts” (from a review by George D. Painter, in The Book Collector, Summer 1967, pp.227-230). ¶ Dust jackets lightly soiled; otherwise a very fine, unmarked copy.