Selva rinovata di varia lettione di Pietro Messia ...: rinovata e divisa in sette parti da Mambrin Roseo, Francesco Sansovino e Bartolomeo Dionigi da Fano, con la Nuova seconda selva ... ampliata della Nuova terza selva, raccolta da Girolamo Brusoni ...

Venice: Niccolo Pezzana, 1658. Very Good. Quarto (23 cm); [50] (of 52?), 788, [8] 152 pages. Lacks half-title. Four title pages, each with Pezzana's woodcut device showing Jove, Juno, Vulcan and Neptune. Occasional woodcut initials and ornaments. Shoulder notes. Bound in marbled paper with leather backstrip; backstrip decorated and titled in gilt. Binding quite worn, with joints tender and boards scuffed, edges exposed. Text generally quite good with occasional worm trails, the most severe of them in the margins. Pages evenly toned. References: Michel, V, 161.

First Pezzana edition of the popular 16th-century "forest of many stories" by Spain's Pedro Mexia. (Nicolò Pezzana purchased the famous Giunti press in 1657, making this one of the first titles issued under his name.) The book is a Spanish Renaissance entry into the genre named "Silvae" by Statius, but this text falls more into the tradition of Xenophon's Symposium, Athenaeus, Macrobius, and Aulus Gellius, that is, expansive, shapeless, episodic, with masses of detail and a stupefying variety of topics and narratives. It was incredibly popular in the 16th and 17th centuries, reprinted in something like 106 editions in every European language. It was a rich treasure chest for later Renaissance authors, such as Miguel Cervantes (whose Quixote is also a forest of many tales, several of them lifted from Mexia) and Christopher Marlowe (who pulled his Tamburlaine from its pages). It is now thoroughly obscure.