Folio (307 x 197 mm), pp [viii] 183 [1], with woodcut printer’s device on title and verso of last leaf (motto ‘in pondere et mensura salus’), woodcut headpieces and initials, 41 astronomical woodcuts and 7 allegorical planetary woodcuts; some light browning, heavier on a few leaves, but a very good copy in contemporary vellum, upper joint partially cracked but sound. £7500
First edition with these illustrations, unique to this edition; they comprise an important and largely unknown group of star maps. The text is based on the Paris edition of 1559, edited by the scholar and printer Guillaume Morel, who collated the commentaries by the early Roman authors Cicero, Rufius Festus Avienus and Germanicus Caesar. Theodore Graminaeus has added illustrations of the constellations, along with his own explanatory text. He has also added a new section on the planets, accompanied by seven allegorical woodcuts.
The constellation figures, 41 in all, are based upon the Dürer planispheres (rather than the inferior Hönter versions), but include details not present in Dürer’s maps. They are depicted externally, i.e. as they would appear on a globe, with the figures seen from the rear. There are radii every 300 long, and the equinoctial and solsticial colures, ecliptic, Arctic, Antarctic, tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, and equatorial circles are depicted and coded to the explanatory text. The stars are magnitudes 1-6, well graduated, and ‘identified by Arabic numerals corresponding with positions in the Ptolemaic catalog. While the figures derive from Dürer, the star numbers in many cases, such as Andromeda, have been corrected’ (Warner).
Some of these illustrations reappear in Graminaeus’ Erklarung oder Auszlegung eines Cometen (Cologne 1573; see Warner p 98), and in much-reduced versions, in Decimator’s Libellus de stellis fixis (Magdeburg, 1587).
Graminaeus was a mapmaker, astronomer, and publisher.
Adams A1518; VD16 A3200; Lalande p 93; OCLC lists the Smithsonian, Rutgers, Columbia, Yale, Michigan, and Ohio
GBP 7500.00
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