Pocket Lucretius: Printed 400 years ago.

[On the Nature of Things] / Lucretius. De rerum natura. Amstelodami: Apud Ioann. Ianssonium, 1626, 24mo in 8s [10.7 x 5.1 cm], 168 pp., the first leaf being a full-page engraved title. Bound in contemporary vellum, author’s name in manuscript on spine. Binding well preserved. Minor edge wear internally, toning to some quires, very genuine.
 
 
Ultra-portable 1626 Amsterdam edition of Lucretius’ De rerum natura, here preserved in its contemporary vellum binding. This is the second Johannes Janssonius (1588-1664) edition, and it shares with his first edition (1620) a notable full-page engraved title relating to the text:
 
“The Janssonius title-page was the earliest printed illustration for the De rerum natura. It represents the sun (personified as a benign face), depicted as made up of atoms in the background, with motes of dust dancing in its beams, an allusion to DRN 2.114-28. Nature as the great Mother, doubling as a version of Venus with multiple breasts, a figure often conflated with Diana, stands on a pedestal above the four Empedoclean elements, feeding the world with milk from her breasts (cf. 5.809-15). These elements are: earth, represented by Demeter, or Ceres, and carrying a basket full of fruit; then fire, embodied by Prometheus, holding a firesteel in his right hand and a flint in his left hand; air, personified as Ganymede straddling an eagle; and finally water as Venus, mother of the Romans, standing on a dolphins and pouring water (a figure which seems again conflated with Diana here)” (L. Cottegnies, p. 172-3).
 
 
OCLC locates U.S. copies of this 1626 edition at Harvard, Kenyon, Oklahoma, Middlebury, Berkeley, and Washington & Lee.
 
*L. Cottegnies, “Michel de Marolles’s 1650 French Translation of Lucretius and its Reception in England,” in Lucretius and the Early Modern, D. Norbrook, et al., eds., pp. 161-190.