Olympia Book Fair 2016 Highlights!
May 23, 2016
Highlights includePomologia Batavaby M. Van Noort.
Bibliographical details:
Noort, M. Van: Pomologia Batava of afbeelding en beschrijving van onderscheidene soorten van appelen en peeren, welke in de Nederlandsche gewesten worden gekweekt. Allen naar het leven in kleuren geteekend en beschreven. Leiden, C. C. van der Hoek [1830]. 4to, 4 pages of introduction, 84 leaves of hand coloured plates lithographed by L. Springer of Leyden each with a corresponding page of explanatory text. Contemporary half leather over rolled book cloth, spine with golden raised bands. Endpapers with a golden pattern of leaves on a black background. Half-title, verso blank. Title-page, verso blank. The foreword Voorschoten 't Huis ter Wadding 22nd December 1830 signed by the author in ink.
Details as follows:
The collation of this very rare book has always proven complicated, perhaps exacerbated by the plates being unnumbered and the hand colour giving visual variants. Nissen calls for 173 plates which is clearly wrong, but may be an interpretation of the number of variant names that van Noordt gives in his text. Landwehr lists 84 plates and cites as five sources amongst which Wageningen. Wageningen has published a website on the Pomologia which lists and illustrates 84 plates without a concordance to Landwehr.
This has thrown up discrepancies (there are minor miss-transcriptions in both Landwehr and the Wageningen site): Landwehr 60 lists VANENBURGER DIRKJES-PEER. Wageningen illustrates both a VANENBURGER plate and a DIRKJES-PEER plate. Three copies record individual VANENBURGER and DIRKJES-PEER plates. If Landwehr made a simple transcriptional error listing two plates on one line. If this is so then Landwehr 84 RENET VAN ZORGVLIET must be the missing 85th plate often speculated on; but then it is hard to explain how Landwehr missed this when inspecting the Wageningen copy. World Cat records 9 copies with 84 plates which with the inclusion of our copy and the Koninklijke copy makes 11 known copies with 84 plates and none recorded with 85 . Whatever the answer to this collational confusion, our copy, with 84 plates is the most complete on the market in many years.
We have some wonderful books at Olympia Book Fair this year - come and see us onstand J26!
