Magnificent first-issue Nuremberg Chronicle in broad margins

Schedel, Hartmann. Liber Chronicarum.

€ 85.000,00

First edition of the Nuremberg Chronicle, and a superb first-issue copy of Hartmann Schedel's "Liber Chronicarum", distinguished by the celebrated state in which the capital A on ff. 257v-258r is omitted in type and supplied by hand. The present copy is further remarkable for its strong, dark impressions, fresh rubrication, and notably ample margins.

Probably the most ambitious publishing venture of the fifteenth century, the Chronicle united Anton Koberger’s international press enterprise with the designs of Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff to produce the most celebrated illustrated book of the incunable period. Its 645 blocks, here printed 1809 times, encompass biblical history, genealogy, city views, maps, saints, prodigies, and the visual rhetoric of universal history on an unprecedented scale.

Schedel compiled the text from a broad humanist library, but the work's real historical agency lies in the synthesis of learned chronicle and image programme: it transformed the world chronicle into a monumental printed object of European reach. Published in July 1493, it also stands among the last comprehensive world surveys conceived before the discovery of the New World entered the printed historical imagination.

The Chronicle’s fame rests especially on the richness and ambition of its woodcut cycle, whose workshop association with Wolgemut, Pleydenwurff, and possibly the young Dürer places the book at the centre of late 15th-century Nuremberg art and commerce. Its immediate success is reflected in the pirated Augsburg reissues that followed within only a few years.

This copy preserves the desirable early state identified by Christopher de Hamel, with manuscript-supplied capitals where Koberger temporarily lacked the relevant sort. Handsomely rubricated in red and blue by a contemporary hand, and preserved in an imposing later English morocco, it remains a magnificent, wide-margined example of one of the defining monuments of early European printing.