Hebrew Printing in Sabbioneta 1 AFFO, Ireneo - Schulz-Falster Rare ...

Giusppe Betussi (ca 1512–1573) from Bassano made his literary career in
Venice, where he befriended many of the literati of the time, such as Lodovico
Domenichi, Pietro Aretino, Francesco Sansovino, Domenico Veniero and
Francesco Doni. He became well-known with the publication of his dialogues
on the nature of love Dialogo amoroso (1543), which he later rewrote
as Il Raverta. He worked for the printer Giolito and then became secretary to
count Collaltino di Collato, with whom he travelled to England.
Adams B850; Index Aureliensis 118.268 ; Schlosser, (1935), p. 330; uncommon,
OCLC records copies at Yale and Chicago for 1556 edition, and Cambridge, Newberry,
Chicago and Kansas for 1557; see Erdmann, My Gracious Silence 6 for Wrst
edition.
The Founder of ScientiWc Anthropology
13 BLUMENBACH, Johann Friedrich. De Generis Humani
Varietate Nativa Liber. Cum Wguris aeri incisis. Naturae Species
Ratioque. Göttingen, Vandenhoeck, 1776. £2750
8vo, pp. [ii], 100, [1] errata, two engraved plates bound at the end;
old paper repair to verso of title; contemporary pastepaper boards,
some surface abrasions to spine, worm trace to inner hinge; from the
Breitenbauch library with engraved book plate to front pastedown; a
good copy.
First edition (second issue, with a cancel title page), uncommon, of Blumenbach’s
doctoral dissertation and best known work, his On the native
Varieties of the Human Race, now considered as the foundation of the science
of physical anthropology – the study of the origin and evolution of
the races of men.
He was preceded by Tyson and Linné who had prepared the ground for
his studies by relating man to the order of the primates. Linné had distinguished
four races of man chieXy by the colour of their skin. From these
premises Blumenbach was able to develop the thesis that all living races are
varieties of a single species, homo sapiens, and that their diVerences were
small compared with those between man and the nearest animal; ‘innumerable
varieties of mankind run into each other by insensible degrees’. It is not
surprising therefore that Blumenbach was opposed to the practice of slavery
and the then current belief in the inherent savagery of the coloured races.’
(PMM 219). ‘In his dissertation one can Wnd the Wrst reliable survey of
the characteristics and distribution of the human races; its most signiWcant
points were included in almost all later anthropological classiWcations’.
The Wrst issue was published without a date (1775) with the imprint F.
A. Rosenbusch, this is the second issue with a cancel title page.
[Provenance:] From the library of the writer, scientist, and government
oYcial Georg August von Breitenbauch (1731–1817), friend of Goethe,
Herder, and Lessing.
Blake p. 51; Garrison-Morton 156 (Wrst issue 1775), Norman 250; Printing and
the Mind of Man 219 (Wrst issue).
susanne schulz-falster rare books