An rare early printing by Zel at the end of the 1460s of Aquinas’ popular tract against heresies; a tall copy printed on crisp, thick paper.
Cardinal Nicholas de Cusa (1401-64), papal legate to Germany in the 1450’s, had popularised Aquinas’ De articulis fide. As he made his way around the dioceses encouraging clerical reforms he called upon all clergy to read and understand Aquinas’ brief tract against heresies. Testament to this is found in four lines printed on the verso of the final leaf which hold a statement by de Cusa about the need for this work to be read at provincial councils in the diocese of Cologne, “Venerabilis dominus … in innovacione statutorum provinicalium ecclesie Coloniensis eisdem statutis interseruit articulum qui sequitur…”.
Ulrich Zel, the first printer at Cologne, printed around 85 titles in the years 1466-72, all short tracts and, as stated by Needham, printed as quartos on half sheets of Chancery paper in a rounded gothic typeface, “in these early years Zel possessed only a modest printing equipment, yet no other printing shop in the period of the later 1460s and very early 1470s had so prolific and closely focused a programme”. The characteristics of these books, in addition to the format and imposition, is that they are all printed in Zel’s first typeface (with variations over time), the majority with 27 lines to a page. The watermarks of Zel quartos are predominantly bull’s heads surmounted by a cross, as found here.
Provenance: although without his book label, likely from the collection of the Cologne bibliophile Hans Schmitz-Otto recently dispersed.
Slight dust-soiling and staining to first and final blank leaf, small brownish stain to gutter of two leaves, bibliographical pencil notes inside front cover.
ISTC it00274000 (41 copies). HC 1424. GW M46415. Goff T-274. BMC III, 860. Bod-inc T-118. Paul Needham “Ulrich Zel’s early quartos revisited”, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 15 (2012), 9-57.
