ANDRÉ, Valère

ANDRÉ, Valère Bibliotheca Belgica

Louvain, Jacob Zegers, 1643

£1,950.00

Small 4to. pp. (xiv) 900. Roman letter, occasional Italic. T-p in red and black with printer’s device; full-page engraving by Pierre Rucholle to verso with arms of F.H. van Kinschot; decorated initials, head- and tailpieces. Light age browning, faint water stains to some margins, occasional spotting, small hole touching a few letters at pp. 15-16. A very good, well-margined copy in C17 polished calf over pasteboards, lacking ties, blind-tooled to a triple-ruled panel design, second border with interlacing pointillé and palmettes, spine in five compartments, blind-tooled triple-ruled borders to each, raised double bands, a couple of wormholes at head and foot, joints cracked. Early autograph ‘Doncker’ and ‘12031’ to recto and verso of fly respectively, ex-libris ‘Coenobii S Aug Lovani 1650’ to upper margin of t-p, the odd early annotation.

Very good copy of the second and much augmented edition of Valère André’s ‘Bibliotheca Belgica’, first published in 1623. André (or Valerius Andreas or Walter Driessens, 1588-1650) was a scholar of antiquities, Hebrew studies and law, and professor at Leuven. His ‘Bibliotheca Belgica’ is a monumental bio-bibliography of Dutch and Belgian authors in the arts, sciences and letters and their works in Latin, French and Flemish (these last often listed with Latinised titles). Prefaced by a topographical delineation of Belgium and an index of names absent in the first edition, it is a fundamental source for the bibliographic history of the early modern Low Countries, and the basis for Jean-François Foppens’s ‘Bibliotheca Belgica’ (1739).

USTC 1004392; Brunet I, 269; Besterman 274.
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