In a previous post (link), the provenances of two luxuriously bound, presentation copies of a book of engraved prints with the Latin title Hystoria Iasonis (Paris 1563) were investigated. This work was published simultaneously in French translation, entitled Livre de la Conqueste de la Toison d’or, par le Prince Jason de Tessalie: faict par figures avec exposition d’icelles, and copies of it also were bound for presentation. Two such copies of the French edition, presented respectively to Charles de Guise, Cardinal de Lorraine (1524-1574), and to his young nephew, Henri I de Lorraine, duc de Guise (1550-1588), are discussed below.
Bindings with the device or name of a publisher or printer stamped on their covers, so-called “publisher’s bindings,” are generally assumed to have been made for display in the publisher’s own bookshop, to advertise the business, or for sale to customers who preferred to buy their books ready bound.1 In 1994, Georges Colin listed four such bindings decorated with the gilt device of the Lyonese printer Sébastien Gryphe.2 Additional bindings are identified here, and it is hoped that this augmented list will facilitate a fresh investigation, bring other bindings to light, and perhaps dispel lingering speculation, that these bindings could just as well have been made for the publisher’s personal library, or for donation by him, or for some other non-commercial purpose.3 The more specimens we know, the better we will be able to explain their meaning.
At least twenty-nine bindings are known with a gilt device of the Parisian publisher Charles L’Angelier (Langelier; 1503-1563) stamped on their covers: two angels, kneeling before the Infant Christ, who holds in His right hand a cord (a love knot), and in His left the Globus cruciger, flanked by the letters “C L,” with a rebus on his name “Les Anges Lies” (or “Les Anges Liers”) in the exergue. The printer’s devices of Charles and his elder brother Arnoul (1497-1557) have a kindred design, without initials:
This binding covering the 1535 Aldine edition of Lactantius and Tertullianus features the name of its owner, “Gas De La Hoz,” within a roundel on the upper cover. The name of the author, “Lectantii Firmiani,” is lettered in gold up the spine. The binding is evidence of how the new fashion for shelving books upright, side-by-side, with backs facing out, was then spreading across Rome. This practice had probably originated with Hernando Colón (Ferdinand Columbus), whose large library in Seville was organised in this way, and who mandated the continuance of the arrangement in his testament (3 July 1539).1 Several Spaniards residing in Rome, notably Luis de Torres and Fernando de Torres (see the entries in this Notabilia file, link and link), and the diplomat Cardinal Giovanni Salviati, who commuted between Rome and the court in Toledo and Seville, promptly adopted it, but with a particular innovation: gilt spine titles. Their Roman bindings are the earliest anywhere to have titles tooled in gilt on the spine.2 This binding for Gaspar de la Hoz, the only known survivor of his library, is probably a decade later.
Three bindings are known with the initials of an owner “.V.C.A.” and a date, respectively “.M.D. XXIIII .II. April.” (2 April 1524), "Anno Dñi .M.D. XXIIII XXXI Avgv.” (31 August 1524), and “M.D. XXVI” (1526), lettered within a cartouche in the centres of the lower covers. A title appears inside a matching cartouche in the centres of the upper covers. Anthony Hobson attributed these three bindings to a Bolognese shop, which he designated the “The German Students’ Binder” on account of the work it undertook from about 1520 to 1535 for Germans attending the university. Ilse Schunke had identified the shop and suggested that it was managed by Heinrich Riger, beadle of the Natio Germanica. Hobson disagreed, maintaining that it almost certainly belonged to a bookseller who was working also as a binder, perhaps the learned “Arnold of Cologne” (Arnoldus Coloniensis), said to have been proprietor in Bologna of the “most elegant bookshop of the Germans” (in elegantissimo Germanorum, cui videlicet tum is praeerat, bibliopolio).1 Most of its bindings cover Aldine editions, and are decorated to similar patterns, with the centre of the upper cover left empty for a title in gilt, and the lower cover for an owner’s name. Hobson thus presumed that books could be bought there ready-bound, and the purchaser's name added at the time of sale.
The three volumes owned by V.C.A. are Aldines: the 1522 Asconius Pedianus, 1495 Theodorus Gaza, and 1523 Georgius Trapezuntius. Neither Hobson nor Tammaro De Marinis, who published one of the three bindings, speculated about the identity of V.C.A. The inscription “P. Vorstius Epus. Aquen.” on the front endleaf of the Asconius Pedianus may be a clue to his identity.