[Appian] Appianus, Of Alexandria

[Historia Romana. ] Appiani Sophistae Alexandrini Romanae Histoiae [...]

      per Bernardum pictorem & Erhardum ratdolt, 1477. 4to., ff. [132] (i.e. 129). Lacking initial blank and two leaves of text (a10 and c10), title mounted with a bit of loss to side of woodcut border and to sidenote on verso. Some leaves lightly stained, a bit of dustsoiling. Frequent early marginal notes (a few trimmed) and underlining in brown and red ink, headlines and folio numbers supplied. Early 20th-century half dark maroon pebbled morocco over matching pebbled cloth red boards, spine in six compartments with raised bands, gilt lettering to second compartment, marbled endpapers, a little scuffed at extremities. The first printing of the first part of Appian's Roman History, in Candidus's Latin translation, elegantly produced by Bernard Maler and Erhard Ratdolt, and an important volume in several respects. Appian (c.95-c.165 AD) wrote a ?Roman History' in 24 books, only about half of which survive complete. The surviving original text, in Greek, would not be published until the Estienne edition of 1551, but in the mid-15th-century the humanist scholar Pietro Candido Decembrio translated the entire work into Latin. When this translation was first printed in 1472, however, only one section of five books was included, covering the civil wars. Five years later, the year of Candido's death, Maler and Ratdolt printed this volume, containing the previously unpublished parts, and a second volume reprinting the other portion. This is thus the first printing of any kind of the first part of Appian's history. Maler and Ratdolt were not only among the earliest printers in Venice, but also among the most important printers in history. Both German emigré printers, like most of their contemporaries in Italy, they partnered for two years, from 1476 to 1478, and in that time produced the first fully-developed woodcut border in Venetian printing, which appears only in this book. Ratdolt, who continued to print on his own after 1478, is credited with a number of other important printing innovations, including the first proper titl