[Opera] Caesar, Gaius Julius 16Th Century,Ancient Authors,Bookbindings - Contemporary,In Latin,Military

The most widely known European military campaign of foreign conquest and civil war. Its simple, lucid prose style instructed Latin students for a half a millennium. Excepting the front matter (papal privileges, errata, etc.), this edition is a paginary reprint of the innovative Aldine of 1513, which offered the first with text-specific illustrations. Each of the book's two parts, the ancient texts and Raimondo Marliani's geographic index, has its own colophon, dated some months apart. Aldus' heirs distributed the first copies of the 1518/19 edition with the four quires - identically signed and foliated - of the 1513 geographic index still in stock, before incurring the additional labor and expense of producing a new edition of the index. This copy belonged to the fierce Scottish patriot, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun (1655-1716), who spent a decade in exile on the Continent, scheming against the British crown. He participated in Monmouth's aborted June 1685 invasion of England. Escaping a Bilbao prison while under sentence of death, Fletcher traveled incognito on the Iberian peninsula, working in libraries and buying books, then traveled east to fight the Turks in Hungary before returning to Scotland to continue his drive for its independence. This copy crossed the Channel with his Netherlands agent, Alexander Cunningham. Characteristically, Fletcher signed his name on the rear pastedown. A fine large copy in original condition. Essling, Les Livres à figures vénitiens 1733-34; Sander, Le Livre à figures italien 1510; Renouard, Annales de l'imprimerie des Alde 88,11; Schweiger, Handbuch der classischen Bibliographie. Lateinische Schriftsteller I: 41; Brown, "Gaius Julius Caesar" in Catalogus translationum ed. Cranz III: 96; EDIT16 CNCE 8155. CONTEMPORARY DARK BROWN FLEMISH PANEL-STAMPED CALF (c. 1530; corners worn, front hinge cracked), ruled outer frame, the panel stamp of wyverns, acorns, foliage, drawer handles and artichokes (see Goldschmidt's Gothic & Renaissance Book Bindings 134), rope marks fill the top and bottom spine compartments and the other three compartments have blind rolls on either side of the bands (crown and base defective), later manuscript-lettered paper spine label, evidence of four ties, edges gilt and gauffered with lozenges and daisies, vellum pastedowns from a 13th-century manuscript written in northern France