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Published by Ex officina Typographica Guiljelmi Ianssonij 1618, 1619, 1618
Seller: Brainerd Phillipson Rare Books, Holliston, MA, U.S.A.
Association Member: SNEAB
Book
Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. All 4 separate emblem books are complete and bound together in this volume. Small quarto. Engraved frontispiece, folding 2-page engraved plate, full-page engraved illustrations, and 95 large circular engraved emblems, the emblems after A van de Venne. With elaborately drawn tail-pieces at the end of each book. Also present at the end of the book is the engraving of "Harders-Clachte" depicting an elegant Dutch house and knot gardens, followed by a long poem by Catherina Van Mulywiick Handsomely bound in scuffed and stained vintage vellum bevelled boards rich with the patina of time and soiled along the spine. Printed on quality paper which is toned; with all engravings and plates present. A remarkable production. Jacob Cats(1577-1660) was a Dutch poet, humorist,juristand politician. He is most famous for hisemblem books. Cats' moralistic poems were told and retold like nursery rhymes over several generations. Even today many of his coined phrases are still colloquialisms in everyday Dutch. Many of Cats' moral poems were set to music. A selection of these,Klagende Maeghden en andere liederen, was recorded in 2008 by the Utrecht ensembleCamerata Trajectina. This quarto contains rare editions of 4 volumes of Cats emblem works, including the famous folding plate depicting children at play in the town square. The emblems depict various aspects of human life: love, morality and religion; and are accompanied by texts in Dutch, Latin, and French. Jacob Cats, known to the Dutch as "Father Cats, " was one of the most popular authors of the golden age of Dutch literature and is best known for his emblematic works. No Dutch poet has ever equalled Jacob Cats in popularity: of hisHouwelyckalone some 50,000 copies were sold between 1625 and 1655. His first major publication was the emblem book. Its title, Alcibiades' Silenus is, true to the style of this genre, a three-stage brainteaser: in Greek mythology a silenus was a follower of Bacchus, usually depicted as a bald, stub-nosed old man. In Plato'sSymposionthe Athenian statesman Alcibiades compares Socrates with the figures representing Silenus in the Athenian jeweller's shops at the time: ugly objects, but if you opened them, they appeared to contain all kind of valuables. This had been discussed extensively by Erasmus in hisAdagia, and also published separately as Sileni Alcibiadis, resulting in the connotation of silenus being ugly on the outside and valuable on the inside. Cats has used this connotation again in a metaphorical sense for an emblem: at first sight incomprehensible, but on closer inspection containing a moral lesson. But Alcibiades's Silenus is also a Proteus (the sea god who could undergo any metamorphosis he wanted), and an extremely versatile one indeed. In the three parts of his book Cats used the same set of illustrations three times, but with three different sets of text. The illustration is used once to apply to love (the emblem as a symbol of love), once to provide a moral lesson, and once as a pious exhortation. Early printings with 1618 and 1619 title pages.