The Cradle of Printing Part 2 [H P Kraus Catalogue 131; 1971]

The founder of the famous New York antiquarian bookseller H P Kraus was born in Austria in 1907. He died in 1988, but the firm he founded closed only recently, after publishing 204 catalogues.

One of the most famous of these was Kraus's own Catalogue 131, which lists 41 fifteenth century printed books from 25 presses in today's Germany, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, England and the Netherlands - some of the books unique and others sought-after examples of a few surviving copies.

The oldest item in the catalogue was "the largest paper copy of the Gutenberg Bible" (c 1455) - the emphasis being on "paper" as vellum copies were usually larger. In chronological order, other books were Ptolemy’s first atlas (1462), Caxton’s Reynard the Fox (1481), Dante’s La Commedia (1481), The Book of Hawking (1486; "the first English sporting book"), Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1491), and Boccaccio's Decameron (1492).

Each item is illustrated and described over four pages. One or more colour plates illustrate a dozen of the books, while there are also 86 halftones and line-cuts.

In a "personal postscript", H P K, as he was known in the world's antiquarian book trade, wrote: "Never before in this 20th century has so formidable an assemblage of great printed books been displayed and offered for sale in a catalogue; perhaps it never can be done again."

The binding is in blue silk, with a title label on the upper panel and the title gilt-embossed on the spine. The viii + 171 pp of illustrated and plates are printed on art paper. This copy is unmarked and includes the additional pasted-in plate showing one of the manuscript catchwords in the lower margin of the [Shuckburgh] Gutenberg Bible and missing in smaller (i e shorter) copies

This copy is in exceptionally good condition.