Unknown copy: the earliest printed travelogue to the Middle East and Arabia

Mandeville, John. Reysen und Wanderschafften durch das Gelobte Land.

Seventh German edition of Mandeville's "Travels" (the third by Prüss, containing his earliest woodcut series). Purportedly an account by an English knight of his journey to the Holy Land, Mandeville's adventures around the Arabian Peninsula, Palestine, Egypt, India, and China were accepted as true throughout the Middle Ages and set the stage for the entire genre or travel literature. Compiled from various sources in the mid-14th century, probably originally in French, the book rapidly became one of the most popular secular texts prior to the invention of printing. The earliest recorded edition is a Dutch version printed ca. 1477; the earliest in German appeared in 1480, and all German inculabular editions are extremely rare. The present version is the work of the canon of Metz, Otto von Diemeringen (d. 1398). Nearly half the text deals with the Holy Land and routes there from Europe, and the remainder chiefly with Asia and Africa.

Binding rubbed and lightly soiled. Some marginal browning and staining, early marginalia imperfectly washed, scattered marginal repairs not affecting text or illustrations; two small wormholes in blank outer and lower margin of last few leaves. Provenance: formerly in the collection of Mary Schell Collins (1864-1948), wife of the Philadelphia publisher Philip S. Collins; sold by her descendants. ISTC lists only six holding collections worldwide, five in Europe and the Yale Center for British Art in the U.S. (im00168000). While ISTC shows nine incunabula for the Estate of Mary S. Collins (including the first edition of Bernhard von Breydenbach's "Peregrinatio" and the 1482 Ulm edition of Ptolemy's "Cosmographia"), the present exemplar of Mandeville's Travels was previously unknown. No copy of this edition can be traced in auction since 1948; Otto Schäfer's copy, bound as part of a larger sammelband, was offered for sale by Jörn Günther in 2017 (no. 8: 825,000 Euros).