The Garden of Health. An Account of Two Herbals. The “Gart der Gesundheit” and the “Hortus Sanitatis”.

Folio. San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 1957. Folio, [viii], 41, [1, blank] pp. Quarter beige cloth, red boards, title printed in black on the backstrip, small spot on lower cover, otherwise a fine copy. § Limited to 300 copies printed by Lawton Kennedy in red and black, with an original illustrated leaf of “De Avibus” (Of Birds) from the 1499 edition of Hortus Sanitatis tipped in. “It was an agreeable conceit of the fifteenth century to attribute to its books of herb and materia medica the qualities of a garden—a garden in which mankind might seek and find those remedies which would bring the priceless gift of health. Two great herbals literally bore the name of ‘the garden of health’—the Gart der Gesundheit, which first appeared in Mainz, the birthplace of printing in 1485, and the Hortus Sanitatis, which was published in the same historic city six years later. For more than half a century thereafter these two classics in the fields of botany and medicine were issued in numerous editions in many of the countries of Europe” (from the introduction). The leaf in this copy is illustrated with three woodcuts. There is some marginal staining but also a few lines of early annotation. Chalmers, A Checklist of Leaf Books, 116.