INSTITUTIONUM ORATORIARUM LIBRI DUODECIM [with] DECLAMATIONES

Lugd. Batav. et Roterodami [Leyden and Rotterdam]: Ex Officina Hackiana [Johannes Hackius], 1665. 195 x 118 mm. (7 5/8 x 4 3/4"). Two volumes. Edited by Cornelis Schrevelius and Johann Friedrich Gronovius.
Pleasing late 18th century reddish brown morocco, gilt (unsigned, but plausibly attributed to Charles Lewis in a pencilled note on front flyleaf), covers with triple fillet border, raised bands, spine compartments with central floral sprig surrounded by small tools, rose sprigs at corners, gilt lettering, gilt-rolled turn-ins, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt. Each volume with extra engraved title page with allegorical illustration. Front pastedowns with bookplate of Paul and Lucia Waterhouse. Dibdin II, 368. ◆Spines and head of two boards sunned to a soft tan, back cover of first volume with inconsequential scratch, occasional minor foxing, but a really excellent copy--clean and especially fresh--with few signs of use inside or out.

In handsome morocco attributable to a noted binder, this is a pleasing copy of the two major works by the Roman rhetorician Quintilian, texts that were extremely influential on pedagogy in the Renaissance. The first and larger work, "Institutionum" ("Education of an Orator"), covers the matter and manner of oratory, important early comments on the theories of education, and a critical history of earlier classical literature that was a key source of information on Greek and Roman writers. The second work contains 164 "declamations" or specimens of oratory, most of them fragmentary, but 19 more substantial. Although attributed to Quintilian and often printed, as here, with "Institutionum," these pieces appear to have been composed by different people at different periods of history, and so they may be regarded as a sampling of the general run of Roman orations. According to Dibdin, our edition "contains the notes of various learned critics, which are said by Harwood to be judiciously selected; the text, according to the same authority, is published with great fidelity." The "Institutionum" here was edited by the Dutch linguist and classical scholar Cornelius Schrevel (1615-84), who edited a number of Greek and Latin authors and is best known for his "Lexicon Manuele Graeco-Latinum et Latino-Graecum," published in 1654 by our printer Johannes Hackius. The great German classicist Johann Friedrich Gronov (1611-71), who served as the librarian of the University of Leyden, edited the "Declamationes." Sandys praised Gronov for producing "editions [that] mark an epoch in the study of Livy, of both the Senecas, and of Tacitus and Gellius." Our very attractive binding is almost certainly English, and may very well be the work of Charles Lewis, one of the leading binders of the first half of the 19th century. The son of a Hanoverian immigrant, Lewis (1786-1836) was apprenticed to Henry Walther at 14, and obtained his freedom in 1807. He set up a shop in Scotland Yard, had other addresses in the Strand, then established himself in Duke Street, St. James, in 1817. By 1823 he was employing 21 journeymen, a number of whom are illustrated in a watercolor of the bindery reproduced in Middleton's "A History of English Craft Bookbinding Technique" (p. 349). Lewis was patronized by the great collectors of the day, including William Beckford, who favored him above all others. In a letter to the bookseller George Clarke written in 1831--the year our binding was done--Beckford declared: "Lewis was, and is, and I hope will continue to be, the first artist in this line that Europe can boast of.".