The past year presented many exciting acquisitions opportunities. In October, copies of two miniature books were secured that were part of the original Zahm Dante Collection but which had been lost during the years of neglect the collection suffered in the middle of the last century: the extremely rare 1516 Paganini edition which had not appeared on the market in perhaps ten years and the curious “Dantino” printed by the Salmin brothers of Padua in 1878.
In January, a Swiss bookseller was able to provide us with copies of nine of the ten volumes of letture and lettioni by Giovan Battista Gelli published in Florence between 1551 and 1561. We also acquired from the same bookseller a copy of the first edition of the Sonetti e Canzoni di diversi antichi autori toscani published by the hiers of Filippo Giunta in 1527. The copy bears the significant provenance inscription of Catalano Trivulzio (1508-1559), bishop of Piacenza. A copy of the second edition of this important work dated 1532 was purchased by the Devers Program in 1997.
Other Dante purchases included a scarce English translation of the Inferno by David Johnston privately printed in 1869 and a selection of 54 items from the library of the late Dante scholar Colin Hardie which was offered by London booksellers Bennet & Kerr. Approximately half of the volumes from this latter purchase will be placed in the general circulating collection since they represent out-of-print but recent works of Dante scholarship.
In addition to acquisition of rare Dante materials, a portion of the Devers library acquisition budget was also used to increase Special Collections holdings of related sixteenth-century Italian literature. Offerings of editions of works by Boccaccio by several booksellers resulted in the purchase of three editions of the Decameron (1541, 1542, and 1557), an edition of the Laberinto d’amore (1525) and a collection of vernacular translations of works attributed to Boccaccio (1598). Other such purchases included an Italian translation of Cicero’s Topics by Pompeo della Barba which includes examples from Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio; an edition of Lodovico Dolce’s Quattro Libri delle Osservationi (1558) and his translations of Virgil (1572) which includes a program of woodcuts borrowed from a Giolito edition of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso which is represented in the Hesburgh Library Special Collections; and an edition of the Poetica of Bernardino Daniello (1536).
