The Book Collector - A handsome quarterly, in print and onl…

the book collector

further expansion of Greek publication to an end, with the great Lexicon of Guarino Favorino (1523) the last typographic venture of Zacharias Callierges. These events form the background to two recent books, Sta V an Fogelmark’s two-volume The Kallierges Pindar (Cologne, Jürgen Dinter, 2015, isbn 978 3 924794 60 6) and Luigi Ferreri’s L’Italia degli Umanisti I: Marco Musuro (Turnhout, Brepols, 2014, isbn 978 2 503 55483 9), also in two volumes. Few books have been subjected to such detailed analysis as Fogelmark has bestowed on the famous 1515 editio Romana of Pindar; only the 42-line Bible and Hinman’s First Folio o V er parallels. It opens with an account of the introduc- tion of printing in Greek to Rome under Leo X and Callierges’s part in it. It then turns to detail of composition and press-work, structure and special characteristics (red printing, measure, page- depth, and special features, notably the use of asterisks). It quickly emerges that in two places passages of the text, one large, another shorter, have been reset. The reasons for this are not clear; some accident required the replacement of most of four sheets, and a lesser quantity of another. Di V erent compositors and paper stocks distinguish the variant settings, but no attempt was made to keep the variant sheets together, with the result that no two copies are the same. Later editions set from a copy of the editio Romana exhibit inevitable variants. Disentangling priority of readings is di Y cult, made more so by variants in Callierges’s favourite setting copy, the manuscript previously Gian Francesco Asolano’s, now BNF MS.gr.2709, apparently made after its early use. Callierges also used editorial prerogative to supply what he thought were superior readings, especially when supported by the 12th-century MS Vat. gr. 1312, formerly Pietro Bembo’s. Few editors, not even the latest, Jean Irigoin, emerge from this complex unscathed by Fogelmark’s comprehensive analysis of the potential for variation. 28 editio Romana readings are unique: are they perhaps evidence of a now lost manuscript? Fascinating as this is, it pales by comparison with Fogelmark’s other discovery, made on 20 June 1991, ‘a warm and sunny day’, when he went to look at the 1515 Pindar at Jesus College, Cambridge. Instead of the usual prelims, dedicatory poem from

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