[Greek title] Aristotelis et Theophrasti Metaphysica. Addita in fine Varia locurum lectio, partime e diversis editionibus, partim ex interpretibus. Addita item, prater Indicem capitum, duo rerum ac verborum Inventaria; Latinum & Graecum

Frankfurt am Main: Apud heredes Andreae Wecheli (heirs of Andreas Wechel), MDLXXXV (1585). Hardcover. Very Good. 4to (210 x 149mm). 16 blank leaves (at front and back), [4], 318, [2] pages, including final leaf with Wechel printer’s device. Title also with Wechel’s woodcut printer’s device (a pegasus soaring over a caduceus, pair of cornucopia and shaking hands, AW monogram twice). Edited by Friedrich Sylburg. Dedicated to French scholar Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540-1609). Latin dedication, notes, and index. Greek text, 18th-century calf, marbled endpapers and red edges, rebacked; (light edgewear, light marginal foxing, title lightly browned). Likely remaining for several generations at the library of Balliol College, Taylor Institution, Oxford (number B.181, deaccessioned sometime in the early 20th century), two bookplates on front pastedown. Collection of Francis Howard Forbes (1881-1957), professor of Greek language and literature at Amherst College (his round pictorial bookplate of Attic-style scribes on front pastedown). This particular copy was cared for by Oxford institutions for a good part of its history, then crossed into a New England personal library of a classical scholar sometime in the early 20th century.

This is the self-contained volume from the 1584-1587 collected edition of the works of Aristotle in Greek and the Metaphysica of Theophrastus. Friedrich Sylburg (1536-1596) was a German classical scholar who made important contributions to several popular Greek texts of the later sixteenth century, like Estienne’s Greek Thesaurus. In 1583, Sylburg resigned from an educational post he held at Lich and moved to Frankfurt to work as leading active editor for the enterprising Wechel publishers. The humanist printers flourished in three distinct cities; Paris, Frankfurt, and Hanau. Andreas Wechel settled the firm in Frankfurt and distinguished it mainly by publishing neo-Latin literature, classical philology, and works by Ramus and his followers. The relationship between Sylburg and the Wechel printers was a seamless match; this 1585 edition of Aristotle was praised for its great critical power and finesse. It is widely regarded as the authoritative edition of its kind. Sound example of a sixteenth century published work on Aristotelian principles born from the inventive relationship between scholar and press.Fabricius-Harles III, 444; Hoffmann I, 275 and 289.