Claudianus (Claudius)

Opera. [Edited by Thaddaeus Ugoletus.]

      Venice: Joannes Tacuinus de Tridino. , 1495 - 40 lines, Roman type, 5-line woodcut initials, woodcut printer’s device on last leaf, a little light soiling in places, last gathering with a faint dampmark, a short, neatly repaired wormtrail in blank margin of 10 leaves, several early corrections and annotations, inscription lightly washed from first leaf, ff. [128], 4to., late 18th-century vellum boards, backstrip with five raised bands, orange morocco label in second compartment, the remains of a small sticker in top compartment and of a bookplate to front pastedown, just a little dust-soiled, very good This incunable is the third printed edition of the works of Claudian, and the second to be edited by Thaddaeus Ugoletus [Taddeo Ugoletti], following the editio princeps (albeit without the epigrams) of 1482 and the first Ugoletti edition of 1493. This is largely a reprint of that 1493 Parma edition, which Moss calls ‘rare, and.more intrinsically valuable than the Ed. Pr.’; it would be reprinted again in 1500. It is recorded (in Dibdin and elsewhere) that Ugoletti meant to expand the text with the works of another Claudian, an early Christian author of epigrams, but was called away from this project by his appointment as Royal Librarian to the Raven King, Matthias Corvinus of Hungary. However, he did have time to improve on the editio princeps, which had printed the text of a single source, by collating several additional manuscripts, including one of notable antiquity which, he reports, was sent to him from Germany. (BMC V 529; Goff C703; GW 7061; HC 5372) [Attributes: Signed Copy; Hard Cover]