Holcot's Super Libros Sapienta with binder's waste from a previously unrecorded incunable

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Rare Books, Autographs & Maps

By Doyle

Nov 25, 2025

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• Lot Description
  HOLCOT, ROBERT Super Libros Sapienta. Basel: Jacobum de Pforczen, 1506. Contemporary English blind-tooled brown calf, covers with a central panel bearing a lattice design with a repeated lozenge-shaped foliage stamp associated with a Cambridge binder, remnants of fore-edge clasps (rebacked); with pastedowns (now lifted by Deborah Evetts, the binder of the Morgan Library) and endpapers consisting of four bifolia from a previously unrecorded work of the first Alost [i.e. Aalst, Belgium] Press of Dirk Martens and Johann of Westphalia, 1470s; the sewing guards small fragments of an unidentified 14th-century manuscript. Housed in a modern leather-backed clamshell case. 11 x 8 inches (28.25 x 20.25 cm); 206 ff., collating 2A-2B6 a-i8 k-l6 m8 n-s6 t8 v-z6 A-C6 D-E8 (E8 blank); 61 lines and headline, Gothic type. Rebacked as noted, binding worn, the incunabular endpapers with some offsetting and soiling, and with early English annotations of various kinds, the text of the main work with marginal staining at front and rear but generally quite fresh, a large copy of this rare work in its first binding. Various 16th-century English owners are recorded in the annotations: these include Thomas Wythe, William Blythe, Alexander Claves, and William Hampton. A rare postincunable edition of a major work by the English divine Robert Holcot, a distinguished philosopher and theologian. An extraordinary feature of this copy is the endpapers, which are the basis of an extensive article by Paul Needham, the distinguished scholar of early printing, published in an article in the journal Quærendo, volume XII/1 1982, pp. 6-22. There Needham identifies the present fragments as comprising eight leaves from a (then) previously unrecorded work of the first Alost press of Thierry Martens and Johannes de Westfalia, 1473–4, the earliest printing shop in the southern Netherlands. The text is Aristotle's Prædicamenta, and these sheets appear to be from a copy that was never sold and bound. Two copies of the offprint of Quærendo with Needham's article are included with the book, together with a folder of research documentation. Also present are transcriptions of the many contemporary annotations present in the book. In addition to details of early ownership, these annotations include a draft of an English indenture of apprenticeship written out on the final blank. N.B.: subsequent to the article in Quærendo, a complete copy of the incunable surfaced in the Earls of Macclesfield library, part II, lot 195, June 10 2004.

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