(DONATUS, AELIUS).

ARS MINOR. NUREMBERG, FRIEDRICH CREUSSNER, CA. 1485).

      Folio. Printed on vellum. Rubricated. 4 (of 16) lvs., with 28 lines to a page. Fragment of an unrecorded Donatus edition, and one of two copies known printed on vellum. The leaves present are A2, A7, B4, and B5 from the original signatures A-B8. The type has been identified as 165 G, a type used by the Nuremberg printer Friedrich Creussner. The present fragment was found not to belong to any of the three other editions of a 28-line Donatus printed by Creussner. GW 8847 we could exclude; GW 8846 could be excluded by the kind help of Dr. E. Hertrich of the Staatsbibliothek at Muenchen, and IDL 1624 (= MMW II, 676), could be excluded at the hand of photostats, kindly supplied by G. van Thienen. Creussner printed all his Donatus editions with the same type: 165 G. He first used this type in a dated edition of 1477 in "Buch des edlen Ritters und Landfahrers Marco Polo", cf. BMC II, 449, and the last dated book with this type was Bernardinus "Sermones", in 1493, cf. BMC II, 454. Donatus wrote his "Ars Minor", a children's Latin grammar, in the 4th century A.D. at Rome, and for over a thousand years it guided children's first steps in the language. Still, over 90% of all editions of the Donatus only came to us in fragments. And only one copy, out of the 10 editions printed by Creussner, has survived more complete than ours. Well preserved fragment, probably survived serving as the inner-linings of an old bookbinding.- (Cut short at outer and lower margin with loss of text; traces of glue and leather). Not in GW, BMC, Goff, Hain, IDL, Polain for the text; cf. Schwencke, Die Donat- und Kalender-Type, in: Veroeffentl. Gutenberg-Gesell., 1903; Nico Israel, Cat. 25, nr. 3 (this copy); NUC lists one copy of a 25-line Donatus on vellum.