Caccialupi, Giovanni Battista. c. 1420-1496.

[De Ludo.]

[Siena, Henricus de Harlem before 10 October 1494].

Folio (384 x 277 mm.). [16], [8]p. Small rounded Gothic type, double-column..

Polished tan calf (scuffed), circular blind stamp of BURLAMACCHI on the rear panel.

            Second Edition (first 1493). On Play treats games of chance and skill, including card and dice games, chess, the ancient hand game Morra, Backgammon, Knucklebones (similar to Jacks), Piastrella (an Italian version of the Conkers) and Zara, a popular medieval gambling game. The book also addresses the legal and ethical aspects of wagers, winnings, recouping losses, participating and spectating. Caccialupi was the leading legal humanist at Siena and the most highly paid professor there. Following his treatise are five additional legal tracts by various authors and a full index of all six works.
            On 10 October 1494, de Harlem reissued the original sheets of On Play with bifolium b1.4 reset and corrected. He omitted the five additional tracts and printed the index for just On Play on the verso of b4. Accordingly, copies of this book are recorded with 12 leaves (as ours) or 8 leaves (with the reset bifolium). GW and ISTC treat these as two issues, while Rhodes believes “they should certainly be considered as two editions”. Our copy is bound with the first edition of a short treatise on inheritance law (Perigli’s Repetitio; ISTC ip00285000), also from de Harlem’s press and dated 28 May 1494, suggesting the time around which he may have first printed On Play.
            No copy of this printing in U.S. collections (Harvard has the 8ff.; Goff C-5). In very good condition (scattered marginal foxing, minor marginal dampstain); contemporary manuscript foliation 78-109 and about seventy words of near contemporary annotations, from the library of Italian bibliophile, Knight of Malta and author Maurizio Burlamacchi (1930-2016).
¶Rhodes, “The Incunabula of Siena” in Essays in Honour of Victor Scholderer ed. Rhodes 56; Zollinger, Bibliographie der Spielbücher 614; Arcangeli, Recreation in the Renaissance 78-9; GW 5840; ISTC ic00005000; see van der Linde’s Das Erste Jartausend der Schachlitteratur 56 and Schmid’s Literatur des Schachspiels II: 135 (both citing a 1584 compilation in which On Play appears).

Item #12294

Price: $35,000.00