Folio.  Quires [1-13^{10}, 14^{12}], 142 leaves, the first blank, 2 columns, 51 lines to the column, without signatures, catchwords, pagination, printer’s name, place or date.  Gothic lower-case type, roman capitals.  Book and chapter headings printed wholly in majuscules.  Large woodcut diagrams.  Three-to nine-line spaces left for chapter and book initials, also spaces for occasional Greek words (mostly left unsupplied) and for small diagrams.  Two pinholes, which in Mentelin’s use point to a date not later than 1473.  Hain 9270.  Brit.  Mus. 15th cent., I, p. 57 (IC. 586).  Burger pl. 170.

On the first page large illuminated initial with floral border ornament, and similar initials at the head of the several books.  Chapter initials supplied in red or blue; initial-strokes in red throughout the volume.  Blank first leaf wanting.

Incorporated with the present edition of the Etymologiae by way of supplement, though not named in the table of contents, is an earlier treatise of Isidore’s entitled De natura rerum, written at the request of Sisebut, king of the Visigoths, 612-621, and dedicated to him.  It contains the sum of the physical philosophy of his time, and, being largely astronomical, is sometimes found in the MSS. under the title Liber de astronomia.  In order to bring it into immediate connection with the corresponding section of the Etymologiae, it is placed immediately after the third book (devoted to the quadrivium, the last division of which is astronomy) and given irregularly the heading “Liber quartus,” the regular Liber quartus (De medicina) beginning twenty pages later.  Two of the 48 chapters of which it is composed are wanting here, but by the subdivision of other chapters the number is raised to 58.  Zainer of Augsburg, the printer of the first edition of the Etymologiae, dated 19 November, 1472, followed it the next month with an edition of De responsione mundi et astrorum ordinatione ad Sesibutum regem, which is the work in question under another title.  Printed with the same type and the same number of lines to the page, it was in effect treated as a supplement to the Etymologiae.

According to the testimony of a fellow printer, de Lignamine, in the “Chronica summorum Pontificum,” Rome, 1474, Mentelin as early as 1458 was printing at Strassburg 300 sheets a day.  The third Latin Bible (1460-1461) and the first German Bible came from his press, but the first work to which he affixed his name and a date was the Speculum historiale of Vincent of Beauvais in 1473.  He died in 1478.

The Wodhull copy, bought at “Hayes’s sale” in 1794 for L5.5s., and bound in russia gilt, with Wodhull arms on side, by Mrs. Weir for L1.2s.  Leaf 15-3/4 x 11 in.

4.  GESTA ROMANORUM. [Cologne, Ulrich Zell, c. 1473.]