A Debreceni Déri Múzeum Évkönyve 1962-1964 (Debrecen, 1965)
Tanulmányok - Salánki József: Wanderings of a Rare Book
József Salánki Wanderings of a Rare Book In the town Saint-Dié in France, a booklet consisting only of 52 quarto leaves was published on April 25th, 1507. The title-page of this first edition, aneditio princeps, bears the following text : COSMAGRAPHIAE INTRODUCTIO cum quibusdam geometriáé ас astronomiae principiis ad earn rem necessariis. Insuper quatuor Americi Vesputii navigationes. Universalis cosmographiae descriptio tarn in solido quam piano eis etiam insertis quae in Ptholomeo ignota a nuperis reperta sunt. On the second leaf Waldseemüller (Graecised into Ilacomilus), the author of Cosmographiae Introductio dedicates his book to Emperor Maximilian. The last leaf bears the symbol of printing shop, the initials of the three printers G (autier) L (udd). N (icolsa) L (udd) and M (artinus) I (lacamilus), andaqi date under the printing shop symbol: Finitum VII Kl. Maij, Anno suprses aquimillesimo VII. (April 25th 1507). Thus the booklet consists of two different works. The first is by Martin Waldseemüller (Ilacomilus by his Graecized name), geographer, and is entitled Cosmographiae Introductio (Introduction to World Geography). Waldseemüller was the first to suggest in this work that the recently discovered fourth continent be named America after Amerigo Vespucci. The second work is a report by Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian traveller from Florence, in which his four voyages to the northern and eastern shores of South America are described. The interest excited by this booklet was so great that six editions were published in 1507; but the copies left to posterity are so few that each of them represents a unique bibliographical rarity. Only two copies of the first edition are known : one is kept in New York, the other in the municipal library of Schlettstadt, France. The Second Edition. Also this was printed in Saint-Dié, and also on April 25 th, 1507. Actually it is only a variation of the first edition, of which leaves 1, 2, 5 and 6 were reprinted, otherwise it. is fully identical with the first. The two first editions differ from each other only in that the first line on the title-page of the first edition reads COSMOGRAPHIAE INTRODU, and the first line on the title-page of the second edition reads COSMOGRAPHIAE INTRODUCTIO, and that the first edition is dedicated by Ilacomilus, the second by the Gymnasium Vosagense to Emperor Maximilian.The Gymnasium Vosagense was a small society of humanist scholars in Saint-Dié, in the early 1500' s. Besides Waldseemüller and the two Ludds, mentioned above, the society had other members who played a part in the creation of the booklet and made their disputes public in this way. About a dozen copies are known to exist of this second edition, and five of them have already gone to America. The Third Edition. Place and date of publication are the same, but it consists of 104 octavo le aves. The only existing copy is kept in the library of Genoa. The next three editions are dated August 29th 1507. In the Library of the Reformed College of Debrecen, in composite volume press-marked F 807 g, a quarto copy of Amerigo Vespucci' s Quatuor navigationes is kept ; it is part of the SaintDié edition of April 25 th 1507, but the first part of the booklet, Waldseemüller' s Cosmographiae Introductio is missing from it. So all we can make certain about this copy is that it is the second part of a copy of either the first or the second edition ; but which of the two it may belong to cannot be decided as it is just the distinguishing marks (the first line of the title-page, the name of the dedicator) of the first two editions of Cosmographiae Introductio that are missing. Thus the copy kept in the College Library may be : 200
