Venice, [Nel Beretin Convento della Ca Grande = Press of the Franciscan friars at Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari] 28 July 1477.

4to (177 x 122 mm.). Contemporary manuscript foliation: [vi], 94 leaves. Roman type, manuscript Lombardic initials in red ink (one six-line), rubrication and decoration in red, brown and yellow, contemporary manuscript imprint on the first recto.

Late 18th-century gilt-ruled red morocco (edges rubbed), gilt-lettered green morocco title label, yellow edges, pink silk marker.

            Second Edition in Italian of the fantastical saga of Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.E.). The Romance established Alexander as a legendary epic hero and was “THE SINGLE MOST POPULAR NARRATIVE FOR ROUGHLY A MILLENNIUM AND A HALF, constituting in effect a protean network of interrelated texts disseminated over massive tracts of Asia, Africa, and Europe” (Selden). Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Castiglione and Ariosto drew inspiration from it. One of its most famous episodes — Alexander’s flight into the heavens — is sculpted on the exterior of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice.
            The book traces Alexander’s life from conception, by his mother’s adultery with an Egyptian sorcerer disguised as a god, to his death, by poisoning during a drunken Babylonian orgy. Nearly a third of the text concerns Alexander’s military campaigns in India, where he battles cynocephali, bearded women, unicorns, elephants, crocodiles and the monster Odontotyrannos. Alexander’s correspondence with the naked philosophers of India criticizes the West and presents a utopian society free of corruption and in harmony with nature.
            From 1474 to 1478, the Franciscan press at Venice printed at least eighteen titles, almost exclusively in the vernacular: “they had no prejudice against profane literature” (BMC V: xvi). Ten of the editions firmly attributed to this monastic press survive in a single copy.
            No copy of this edition is recorded outside of European libraries. A single, defective copy of the first edition (Treviso 1474) is held by an American library (Library of Congress). (Our edition is a nearly line-for-line reprint of the first.)
            In good condition (mild soiling throughout (thirty leaves more so), two marginal tears repaired with paper and tape). Thirty pages have been marked in the margins by a contemporary hand with a system of lines and dots. From the libraries of Thomas Crofts (1722-81; Bibliotheca Croftsiana 1358) and Michael Wodhull (1740-1816), who noted on the front flyleaf his acquisition at Crofts’ sale.
¶The Greek Alexander Romance tr. Stoneman 2; Lowry, “‘Nel Beretin Convento’: the Franciscans and the Venetian Press (1474-78) in La Bibliofilía 85 (1983) 27-40; Selden, “Ancient Narratives of the West” in The Encyclopedia of the Novel edd. Logan et al. 29; Cary, The Medieval Alexander 13-5, 38-56, 169, 221-5 & 260-70; Storost, Studien zur Alexandersage in der älteren Italienischen Literatur 168-71; ISTC ia00409500.

Price: $65,000.00