Pentateuchus Moysi, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numeri, Deuteronomium; Josue, Liber Judicum, Ruth

Paris: Simon de Colines, 1527

[8], 493 [i.e. 439], [1] leaves | 16mo | a-z^8 &^8 A-V^8 aaa-mmm^8 | 112 x 69 mm

The second Colines edition of this pocket Bible part, containing the Pentateuch and first eight books of the Old Testament, first published it in 1525. Colines issued further editions in 1530, 1532, and 1539. ¶ Paris pioneered these small-format partial Bibles in the 1520s, an innovation that quickly proved popular and went on to influence similar editions elsewhere in northern Europe. "Books of this size could be not only carried but almost fully hidden in the hand" (Needham). Pierre Vidoue introduced the genre in 1521 with his New Testament, though it would be fair to say Colines eclipsed him. Indeed, it was Colines who "soon dominated the market," producing dozens of editions into the 1540s. "These are strikingly handsome, using a specially designed Roman type," and they could be purchased individually or assembled to create a complete Bible. ¶ We're rather charmed by the simple elegance of the four-line open initials Colines used here, in the same style as the open 'D' used in his hugely influential 1525 Horae. “Colines introduced a lighter, more open and more mellow quality into the printed page," a character on display even in this small format. "His books show a refreshing awareness of type and related typographic decoration and an overall artfulness in book design" (Blumenthal). He had both the skill and the pedigree for such excellence. He worked for Henri Estienne, married his widow, and ran Estienne's press until his son Robert was ready to take the helm. "De Colines opened his own press then, and the two men dedicated themselves to the formal and architectonic ideals of Renaissance typography, concerned with the pure beauty of the text. Together, by the end of the first half-century, they transformed French printing and made French typography the most sought-after in all Europe—the standard of excellence for the next two centuries" (Levarie).

PROVENANCE: With marginalia by a diligent early reader on more than 80 pages, largely a blend of way finding, cross referencing, and adducing further evidence from additional sources. These are mostly brief, though many do run to several lines. With additional early manuscript notes on [18] p. bound in at end—a handful of biblical excerpts and reading notes, but largely a customized index for the present work. "To an observant, informed, and dedicated later reader, these simple memoranda can be quite revealing. The total number of notes may be an indication of the degree of the earlier reader’s interest. The order of page references may reflect the order of reading—was the book read through, or dipped into?—and the number of readings. The selection of topics gives an impression of the kind of thing the reader was looking for, or arrested by" (Jackson).  ¶ Early ownership signature of one John Willson on the title page. As English Protestants were unlikely to use the Latin Vulgate, this copy likely belonged to an English Recusant, the minority that never gave up the Catholic faith after the English Reformation imposed its new Anglican religion on the entire population. Our owner's name is rather unhelpfully common, and there must have been quite a few recusant John Wilsons over the years. Perhaps the best known was the author of the English Martyrologe (1608), who also operated a recusant English press at St. Omer in the early decades of the 17th century. But our binding is almost certainly English, and so we're inclined to look on British soil—where we find, for example, a recusant John Wilson of Bunbury imprisoned in the 1590s. A Vulgate Bible seems fairly innocuous on the grand spectrum of recusant literature, but nonetheless consistent with recusant reading habits. To be sure, “much of the English recusant literature is nonpolemical books of lay spirituality and devotion, written to sustain faith among Catholics with little or no access to the services of a priest. Recusant Catholicism, like Protestantism, was profoundly dependent on the written word." ¶ Old black ink stamp of Cornwell House on front fly-leaf.

CONDITION: An early English binding, if not quite contemporary, the boards paneled with gilt and blind frames, and the spine simply tooled in gold and blind; edges sprinkled red. Last leaf is blank. ¶ Renouard mistakenly calls for [9] preliminary leaves (something Schreiber corrects). We suspect Renouard's copy lacked the final blank, which would have otherwise mathematically reconciled his foliation and collation. He appears instead to have assigned unnumbered fol. [1], from the main sequence, to the preliminary sequence. ¶ Trimmed close, affecting some marginalia, typically notes in the upper margin; roughly a centimeter trimmed from the fore-edge of the title; first few leaves a bit soiled. Leather cracked along the rear joint, but all cords are intact and the board remains firmly attached; a little loss at the head of the spine.

REFERENCES: USTC 181046; Fred Schreiber, Simon de Colines: An Annotated Catalogue of 230 Examples of His Press, 1520-1546 (1995), p. 31, #25; Renouard, Bibliographie des éditions de Simon de Colines (1894), p. 94 ¶ Schreiber, p. 22 ("In 1522 Colines began publishing inexpensive and handy miniature editions of the eight major groups of the Latin Bible, issuing one or another of these groups regularly over a period of about 12 years, as demand required"); Paul Needham, "The Latin Bible in the Renaissance and Early Print Culture," The Oxford Handbook of the Latin Bible (2023), p. 281 (after the 15th century, "Bibles in smaller formats became considerably more popular. Editions of partial Bibles proliferated...Partial Bibles in miniature formats, most commonly sextodecimo (16mo; about 11 x 7 cm), were a Paris innovation of the early 1520s that quickly found a receptive market...The innovator was Pierre Vidoue, who in 1521 published a New Testament in an even smaller format...Up to the early 1540s, Colines's shop produced more than seventy partial Bible editions, which could be acquired separately or assembled as complete Bibles according to the wishes of individual buyers. This model was copied by other Paris presses, as well as those in Antwerp and Lyons."); Joseph Blumenthal, Art of the Printed Book 1455-1955 (1973), p. 15 (cited above); Norma Levarie, The Art & History of Books (1968), p. 189 (cited above); Robert Bringhurst, The Scythe and the Rabbit: Simon de Colines and the Culture of the Book in Renaissance Paris (2012), p. 11 (“He as much as anyone built the semiotic structure of the book as we now know it, with its chapter headings an subheads, page numbers and running heads, tables of contents, indices, and source notes….Colines played a crucial role in establishing the tradition of vivacity and serenity in letterform design that even now enables us to read with both efficiency and delight.”); K.R. Wark, Elizabethan Recusancy in Cheshire (1971), p. 82 (for John Wilson of Bunbury); Jane Stevenson, “Centres and Peripheries: Early-Modern British Writers in a European Context,” The Library 21.2 (June 2020), p. 174 (cited above); H.J. Jackson, Marginalia (2001), p. 37-38 (cited above)

Item #703