One of the first books printed in Germany from Arabic type

Kirsten, Peter. Notae in Evangelium S. Matthaei ex collatione textuum Arabicorum Aegyptiac[orum] Hebrae[orum] Syriacor[um] Graecor[um] Latinor[um] quae non modo studiosis linguarum, sed et cuilibet vero Christiano erunt utilissimae.

€ 5.000,00

First edition of the "notes on the Gospel of Matthew" by the pioneering Arabist and physician Peter Kirsten (1577-1640), who started a private press in Breslau (Wroclaw) in 1607 (cf. Reske 130). His Arabic type, the first to be cut in Germany (by Peter von Selau), shows the influence of the Medicean types.

This is the issue with the letterpress title; another issue has an engraved title. Some copies lack the fifth preliminary leaf (present here): a singleton printed on different paper and in a different typeface, containing a 26-line laudatory poem in Hebrew by Jakob Ebert of Frankfurt, with the Latin translation on the recto.

Kirsten's notes on Matthew's Gospel "are mainly a comparison of the Arabic with the Greek version, and serve to explain the Arabic text. The Coptic and Syriac versions mentioned in the title are no more than marginal readings indicated as such in the Arabic manuscript which he used. These versions, as well as the Hebrew version, are mostly given in Latin translation, but occasionally a slight 12 pt Hebrew type-face is employed" (Smitskamp).

"One of the earliest non-Dutch scholar-typographers in [the] post-Medici tradition was the German Peter Kirsten (1575-1640), a physician of Breslau (Wroclaw), who had travelled and studied in both Italy and Leiden. He created a superior type-face, with some calligraphic qualities" (Roper).

Some very light browning and spotting, but a good copy. OCLC records two copies in the US (New York Public Library and University of Pennsylvania, both apparently with only four preliminary leaves).