ETYMOLOGICON MAGNUM [:in Greek]

1499. Greek type, double column, 50 lines. Typographic devices printed in red, decorated initials by Ioannes Rosos, all woodcuts, headings, brackets, capital for each entry printed in red. 224 leaves. Folio (393 x 273 mm.), finely panelled cont. calf (well-rebacked, joints & edges carefully repaired), later red morocco lettering-piece on spine. Venice: Kallierges & Vlastos, 8 July 1499.


First edition; a fine and large copy of the first all-Greek lexicon ever printed and the first book published by the press of Kallierges and Vlastos. With the ownership inscription of Agostino Giustiniani (1470-1536), editor of the Psalterium haebreum, graecum, arabicum et chaldaeum (Genoa: 1516), on the first leaf.


“Kallierges spent five years in devising and making his type; this seems to imply a large amount of time spent on experiments…His method seems to have been, that separate punches were cut for letter and accent, or abbreviation; that the two punches were then camped together, and the matrix was struck from the two combined, so that they were cast in one piece; in this way a great saving in the number of punches was effected, through the number of sorts in the finished type was very much larger than it was on the Aldine plan.”–R. Proctor, The Printing of Greek in the Fifteenth Century (1900), p. 21.


“No attempt to describe Etymologicon magnum could possibly do justice to what is generally regarded as the finest specimen of Greek typography ever produced and one of the masterpieces of incunabular printing in any language.


“Kallierges was in charge of the printing, with Ioannes Grigoropoulos and Nikolaos Vlastos available for consultation on certain technical and artistic points…The greatness of Kallierges’ achievement is that although he made use of well-known decorative designs for the headpieces and illuminated initials, he succeeded in giving his book — especially the Etymologicon — a style that is all their own, of such perfection that the more one looks at them the more one feels not a single stroke is out of place or superfluous”–K. Staikos, “The Printing Shop of Nikolaos Vlastos and Zacharias Kallierges: 500 Years from the Establishment of the First Greek Printing Press” in Cento anni di Bibliofilia: atti del Covegno internazionale, Biblioteca nazionale centrale di Firenze, 22-24 aprile 1999 (Olschki: 2001).


The fine Estelle Doheny copy (her sale Christie’s NY, 22 Oct. 1987, lot 110), with a compelling contemporary provenance.


❧ ie00112000.