Albertus Magnus | First pocket edition and the final separate sixteenth-century printing of De Mineralibus, Cologne, 1569

Albertus Magnus

De mineralibus et rebus metallicis libri quinque. Cologne: Johann Birckmann and Dietrich Baum, 1569

12mo (126 x 72 mm). Italic and roman types. Woodcut printer’s device on title-page, with terminal blanks R11 and R12; some light browning and scattered stains, D4 and D9 with neat early paper-patched repairs. Nineteenth-century stiff vellum, overlapping fore-edges, earlier calf spine title preserved as label, early red edges, plain endpapers; a bit soiled.

First pocket edition, eighth overall, and the final separate sixteenth-century printing of one of the most significant scientific works of the Middle Ages. Albert based this work—and most of his writings—on the study of ancient Greek and Arab texts coupled with his own empirical observations. His stated goal in De mineralibus was to articulate “in a manner which can be supported by reasoning, either what has been handed down by philosophers or what I have found out by my own observations. For at one time I became a wanderer, making long journeys to mining districts, so that I could learn by observation the nature of metal.”

Albert’s time as a wanderer refers “to a period in his life, apparently when he was fairly young, when he toured Germany ‘as an exul [wanderer/exile]’, visiting several mining and smelting sites. When Albertus visited mining works, he would talk to miners (fossores) and smelters (depuratores), and we know the names of several mining districts he visited: the mines of Rammelsberg near the mines of Goslar in the Harz Mountains …; Lübeck in far northern Germany; Freiberg, ‘Free Mountain’, mining silver; and a place he calls mons aeris (Copper Mountain, Kupferberg in German). … Albertus may also have visited the so-called Cologne Pits near Ems and the Lüderich mines that produced lead and lay near Cologne. … [His] close observations offer insights into the mining of the time …” (Resnick & Kitchell Jr., p. 162). 

REFERENCES

Adams A528; Bruning 394; Hoover 39; cf. Irven M. Resnick & Kenneth F. Kitchell Jr., Albertus Magnus and the World of Nature (London: Reaktion Books, 2022)

PROVENANCE

R. H. Inglis (armorial inkstamp on title-page verso) — Free Public Library Wigan (discreet blindstamp on title and three leaves at end, indiscreet call number at foot of spine) — Christie’s London, 8 July 1993, lot 4 (undesignated consignor)