[GREEK PSALTER, ed. DECADYUS, Justinus.]

A very good copy of the Aldine Greek Psalter, the third Greek Psalter to be printed, after Milan 1481 and Venice 1486. It appeared in Aldus’s first catalogue of books, published 1 October 1498; the Greek type was the same used to print the Aldine Aristotle, and went out of use in the middle of that year. The editor of the text was a Greek native of Corfu. He addressed it ‘to the Greeks of Greece’, implying it was designed for liturgical use in the Greek context. However, it must have been popular with Latins hoping to learn Greek through comparison with their own Latin psalters.

There were two errors in the typesetting of the Psalterion. ‘Twice, at the beginning of a new gathering (ι and ρ), a section amounting to approximately one line of text was, inexplicably, dropped out. Leaves ι1r and ρ1r thus contain the same twenty lines as any other regularly printed page, but a part of the text is clearly missing, and the preceding catchwords make the discrepancies patent’ (Geri della Rocca de Candal, ‘Lost in Transition: A Significant Correction in Aldus Manutius’s Psalterion (1496/98)’ in The Library, 23.2 (2022), p. 159). Since the catchwords indicate missing text, we can assume that the faults were not caused by the manuscript or printed text from which the compositors were working, so the error must have taken place during casting off or composition (p. 160).

Only one of the errors, that on ι1r, was identified by the printers. In some copies (those already printed) it was corrected by hand, while in some copies the sheets were recomposed. Della Rocca de Candal has identified two hands in which these corrections were made, identifying ‘Hand A’ as Manutius’s own (pp. 164 and 165-166). Even during this process an error – two words omitted – was copied into the printed copies by hand until it must have been identified by the correctors, after which only Hand A carried out the now correct emendations. This copy contains the full correction in Hand A, which is ‘virtually certain’ to be Aldus’s own. It appears as number 30 in della Rocca de Candal’s census of copies (p. 175).

‘Renouard observes that the honour of having projected the first plan of a Polyglot Bible is due to Aldus … At the beginning of the preface to the Aldine Psalter … mention is made of the probability of a Hebrew, Greek, and Latin Bible being speedily executed by Aldus. Of this projected work, however, only one sheet was printed’ (Dibdin, Introduction, p. 1).

‘Volume rare, très bien imprimé’ (Renouard). ‘Édition rare’ (Brunet).

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