Catalogus Codicum MSS. Bibliothecae publicae Florentinae.
Florence, G. Targioni Tozzetti [1740-3].
Three volumes. Folio (I: 294 x 207 mm., II: 295/322 x 208/224 mm., III: 364 x 251 mm.). [742], [788] and [158]p. Multiple paper stocks. Text, annotations and corrections in a single cursive hand, mostly in two columns, nearly all pages canceled in red crayon, twenty-two slips pasted in and forty-two leaves completed in two other hands (Vol. II).
Original worn binder’s boards backed in blue paper (Vols. I-II; Vol. I recased) and original binder’s boards (Vol. III), almost entirely uncut.
“Essentially unexplored…the first catalogs of the Biblioteca Magliabechiana have never been adequately studied” (Mannelli Goggioli, tr.).
In 1714, Antonio Magliabechi donated his thirty-thousand-volume library to the citizens of Florence, creating the Biblioteca Magliabechiana (now Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze). The collection grew through the bequest of his pupil Anton Francesco Marmi (d. 1731) to some forty thousand printed books and eight thousand manuscripts. Appointed librarian in January 1739, the naturalist Targioni Tozzetti (1712-83) completed a twelve-volume catalog of printed books by 1743 and a preliminary four-volume catalog of manuscripts by 1747, in time for the library’s public opening.
THE THREE CODICES OFFERED HERE DOCUMENT THE EARLY STAGES OF A DIFFERENT, MUCH MORE ELABORATE ANALYTICAL CATALOG OF MANUSCRIPTS, a project on which he labored independently from 1740 until his death.
In this initial phase, Targioni Tozzetti distributed some fifteen hundred codices across forty classes within which he assigned each manuscript a number, established its main entry and noted the donor (Magl. or Mar.). His thorough entries, some several pages long, record format, support, date, binding, defects, contents of miscellanies, incipits, explicits, marginalia, corrections, scribes, previous owners, paleography, decoration, textual accuracy and philological relevance.
Our manuscript also includes classified inventories of 15th- and 16th-century printed books, a list of some fourteen hundred reference books and two short-title selections of the collection’s notable manuscripts. Classes IX, XXV-XXVII, XXXIII and XXXV are absent here and likely occupied a now lost fourth volume.
As the project progressed, Targioni Tozzetti modified his descriptions through an impressive stratification of glosses and additions. Eventually, he transferred the whole into a fair copy and canceled the transcribed pages in the present manuscript by striking them through with crayon. His heirs sold the resulting eleven-volume catalog to the Magliabechiana in 1786 (Sala Manoscritti e Rari, Cataloghi 45). it remains the primary means of access to the magliabechi and marmi manuscripts today. In good condition.
¶Mannelli Goggioli, La Biblioteca Magliabechiana. Libri, uomini, idee passim; Innocenti, “Stratigrafia dei cataloghi: procedure di destratificazione del maggior nucleo italiano di manoscritti e libri antichi” in Il Bosco e gli alberi ed. Innocenti I: 295-523.
Price: $58,000.00