Sotheby's (London)

(28 cm), 8 pp., illustrations (most in colour). Publisher’s pictorial wrappers. - Offprint for lot 59 in Sotheby’s sale, “Continental books and manuscripts”, 5 December 1996, a copy of the three-volume Dictionarium, seu Latinae linguae Thesaurus (Paris 1543). The copy contains three inscriptions (dated 1559, 1584, 1633) in the hand of a Dominican inquisitor, the earliest mentioning the beautiful binding, and the second specifically allowing Giovanni Battista Grimaldi and his sons to read the book. This evidence was crucial to Anthony Hobson’s identification of Giovanni Battista Grimaldi (c. 1524-c. 1612) as the original owner of the “Apollo and Pegasus bindings” (Apollo and Pegasus: an enquiry into the formation and dispersal of a renaissance library, Amsterdam: Van Heusden, 1975). ¶ Unmarked copy.