[DICTIONARY]

Vocabularius rerum [in Latin and German].

      [Augsburg, Günther Zainer, 1473-74] Folio (290 x 208 mm), ff 138, gothic letter, large woodcut initial at beginning of text, painted in red, some underlining and initial strokes supplied in red; leaves numbered in MS with cross-references in the index, occasional MS annotations, a very fresh, large copy, with many deckle edges, pastiche binding ca 1900 of wooden boards and blind-stamped calf spine. £40,000

First edition, extremely rare, of the first printed technical dictionary, and, after the Vocabularius ex quo, the first dictionary to employ two languages. This work is devoted entirely to technical terms, each with its own section, of medicine (four sections), culinary and medicinal herbs and food plants, zoology, mining and mineralogy, navigation, architecture, textiles, tanning and leather work, musical instruments, books and book production, cooking and kitchen utensils, baking, wine and viticulture, gambling, carpentry, horses and carriages, etc.
'Some of the words are highly technical, lexicographical rarities. In the section on scribes and book production we find definitions not only of the traditional scribal tools (calamus, stilus, graphius, pugillaris, etc.), but also of such specialist words as antipira (= the scribe's eye-shade, for protection against the fire or candle-light), corrosorium (= the mill or grinder to reduce chalk to a powder for the preparation of vellum), and epicausterium (= the table-cloth on which the parchment is laid for ease of writing). None of these last words occurs, for example, in Karen Gould's "Terms for Book Production in a Fifteenth-Century Latin-English Nominale", The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 79 (1985), pp. 75-99. There is also an entry on the distinction between the words liber, volumen, and codex; likewise between exemplar and exemplum.' (Nicholas Poole-Wilson).
A large part of the work is devoted to medicine, including anatomical terms, surgical terms and instruments, diseases and their definitions, etc. There are also extensive lists of plants, including culinary, horticultual, and medicinal plants.
'Possessed of a knowledge of names rather than of things, the mediaeval student had one urgent need - a dictionary. New words began to pour in - in Arabic, Syriac, Hebrew, and Greek - whose meanings he sought to know; and, for the medical student, there were new drugs, the composition and uses of which were essential to his practice. It is not surprising then to find books of the dictionary class among the first to be printed... The Vocabularius, a Latin-German dictiionary from the press of Günther Zainer, Augsburg, about 1473, has four sections devoted to medicine: (1) De homine et de diversis membris, in which the parts of the body are defined in order, with the German equivalents; brief references to authors are given. (2) De nominibus balneatorum etc., containing all the terms relating to bathing, bleeding, and cupping. (3) De medicis et eorum que pertinent ad medicine artes. The definitions here are most interesting... Siringa is described as a metallic instrument with which a surgeon injects resolving medicines into the Virile member in order to dissolve calculi in the bladder. (4) De nominibus quorundam egritudinum, contains seven and a half folios of definitions of diseases.' (Osler, Incunabula medica).
This work is very rare, no copy having appeared at auction in Britain or America for over twenty-five years.

Provenance: André Simon, with bookplate, but not in his Bibliotheca Bacchica nor in the 1981 sale catalogue of his gastronomy collection

C6326; BMC II 321; Klebs (Add) 1044.01; Osler IM 47; Goff V322 (Chicago, Grolier, Huntington, Yale, and National Library of Medicine); Poynter 600 (William Morris copy); Sudhoff 104; Stillwell 288; Schullian and Somer 485; ISTC lists, in addition to the five U.S. locations above, two copies in London (BL and Wellcome), one each in Italy (Vatican), Basel, Copenhagen, and Kyoto, and 18 in Germany, of which at least one is imperfect