DANIEL.
UNRECORDED GREEK IMPRINT
[Greek]. Daniel. Hoc est, Danielis prophetia & historia graece.
[Dortmund], Albertus Sartorius, 1560.£4,950.00
8vo. pp. 75, [iii], lacking final blank. Greek letter, decorated initial. Slight browning, title dusty, light water stain to lower inner gutter or outer (mainly blank) margins, minor repair at gutter of last leaf. A good copy in late C19 marbled boards, small loss at foot of spine, all edges sprinkled blue. c1900 devotional image to front pastedown, late C16 Greek and Latin interlinear ms annotations (occasionally trimmed but still legible) in a Germanic hand to handful of leaves and filling 3 blank pages at rear, with couple of sketches, C19 ink stamp ‘Gymnasium Luccaviense’ (Luckau) to title verso.
An apparently unique copy from Dortmund (Tremoniae) of the Greek Septuagint translation of the Book of Daniel – the ‘sister book’ to St John’s ‘Apocalypse’. It comprises the canonical 12 chapters in the Hebrew Bible, as well as two final chapters from the Greek Apocrypha, with the stories of Suzanna and the Elders (ch.13) and of Bel and the Dragon (ch.14), which are included among the Christian, not the Hebrew, canonical texts. The Prayer of Azariah and Song of the Three Holy Children, usually present in the Greek Apocrypha as part of Daniel 3, are here absent, following the Protestant fashion. It is a very traditional textbook edition – and one of very few C16 separate Greek eds of Daniel – devoid of all commentary and even without the editor’s name. The printer, Albert Sartor, was one of two recorded in Dortmund in the 1560s-70s; the small-scale activity may account for the rarity of his editions, most of which are lost or survive solely in 1 copy. Textbooks like the present were probably produced at the behest of local grammar schools. A Germanic student provided interlinear Latin translations to chap. 7-9, i.e., the visions of the beasts from the sea, of the ram and goat, and of the Seventy Weeks, with marginal glosses highlighting the topic of each section. In the blanks, he wrote down Latin notes on the Old Testament books, sketches of two faces, the German ‘mein geist’ (my mind), and several lines in Greek.
Not in USTC, VD16 or WorldCat.