Ardore di Amore. In cui si contiene Serenate, Capitoli e Stanze da Giovani innamorati. Con aggiunta d'Alcune Villanelle alla Napolitana e Sonetti dilettevoli

18mo? (145 x 101 mm). Collation: A24 (vertical chainlines). 48 pp. Crude title woodcut of a musician serenading a woman at her window, archaic woodcut headpiece and two initials. Mostly light dampstaining (heavier at end), short marginal tear to title. Contemporary carta rustica wrappers.*** Apparently unrecorded chapbook edition of a collection of popular love poems, serenades, and other rhythmic verses, to be set to music, most if not all by the 16th-century Florentine writing and arithmetic master, poet, and self-identified bookseller Giovanni Battista Verini. As is invariably the case for chapbook printing, the rarity of surviving copies of all editions of these popular poems is a direct reflection of their wide distribution and readership; most copies were read to shreds and discarded. The Marescandoli dynasty of publisher-printers in Lucca spanned three centuries, remaining active from 1654 to 1805. Around 800 editions bearing their imprint are known; they were also booksellers, disposing, in 1766, of a warehouse containing over 186,000 individual books (Marcazzani, p. 2). The Marescandoli name, noted the author of a modern doctoral thesis on the family (loc. cit.), was "synonymous with poor printing," i.e., they were purveyors of cheap books for sale throughout the rural regions of Tuscany. Grandsons of the founder Francesco Marescandoli, the brothers Salvatore e Giandomenico worked together for no less than 60 years; in 1765 they took on an associate, and continued printing under the present imprint from 1767 until 1782, when they ceded the firm to Domenico Marescandoli (op. cit., p. 5). This collection of love poems by one considered a poet of the "populace," was apparently a staple of the Marescandoli presses: in 1766 their inventory listed 500 copies of what was known in shorthand as the "Ardor" (Marcazzani, p. 31), but very few copies of these slim chapbooks survive. None are listed in the ICCU OPAC or in USTC. OCLC lists two copies of a different edition, with the imprint of Domenico, thus after 1782, held by Wellesley College and the Biblioteca Casatanese. Cf. G. Marcazzani, I Marescandoli di Lucca: l'azienda, il catalogo (Pisa University, 2012), dissertation, online; cf. Stanley Morison, "Some New Light on Verini," Newberry Library Bulletin III (1953), pp. 41-45. …