Author: QUARITCH - CATALOGUE 175.
Title: Monuments of typography and xylography. Books of the first half century of the art of printing in the possession of Bernard Quaritch, and offered for sale at the affixed prices. (title on cover: Monuments of printing. Comprising books produced by the earliest presses in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, France, Spain, and England from 1455 to 1500. And a few remarkable examples of a somewhat later date.)
Description: London, Bernard Quaritch, 1897. L-8vo. xv, 312 pp. Wrappers. (good copy) ¶ One of the most spectacular catalogue of incunabula ever issued. It took Bernard Quaritch twenty years to collect these 616 items. It includes 157 titles printed in Germany, including the Mazarine Gutenberg Bible, illuminated and printed on vellum (for the sum of £ 5000.-), 37 from the Netherlands, 225 from Italy, 46 printed in France, 81 in Spain, and 37 in Britain. "The catalogue comprises 643 entries, mostly related to editions that appeared in the fifteenth century, and offers a survey of early printing, while simultaneously representing a veritable monument to Quaritch’s career as an antiquarian bookseller. It was a catalogue the like of which had never been issued by any bookseller. When he died, in 1899, he had hardly a penny to his name, but he owned the finest stock in the world” (S. de Ricci, English Collectors of Books and Manuscripts, p. 165)." - M.Paulumbo, Bernard Quaritch and Dante. Quaritch includes the ‘only’ 364 incunables in his own stock in another catalogue likewise issued in 1897, under the slightly different title Monuments of Typography and Xylography. Books from the first half Century of the Art of Printing, in which examples of early Italian printing form the lion’s share, with a stunning series of ninety-three incunables beginning with a copy of Augustinus’ De Civitate Dei, printed in Subiaco in 1465. Both catalogues are introduced by identical lengthy Prefaces, in which Quaritch sketches the history of printing, presenting his collection as “the fruit of assiduous gathering during twenty years, and although made by a mere bookseller, is one which many museums might be proud of”.

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