A Dyetary

Item Details

Oxford, the old Daniel Press in the Bodleian Library,, 1963, Wrappers

Very good+

5 3/8 x 7 ¾ in. [8] pp. Glossary.

Brown wrappers, saddle stitched. Title printed in black. Very mild shelfwear to wrapper edges. Light toning to pages. Small moisture stain to first leaf. Dedicated to Dr. E. E. Coleman and signed by printer Roy Vernon Sowers. A very good + copy.

One of a hundred copies. OCLC lists two copies: One at Yale University Medical Library and the other at Texas Medical Center Library. No copies in commerce presently.

Roy Vernon Sowers (1897–1970) was a rare bookseller born in Ontario, Canada, who briefly studied at Oxford  before eventually settling in California, where he would work for the antiquarian bookseller Alice Millard and the Huntington Library. He started his book business in the Los Angeles area, but spent most of his career in the Bay Area. His papers are at Stanford. He was especially known for the eccentric and curmudgeonly introductory essays in the catalogs he issued.

From the explanatory note: “During 1489, William Caxton issued in one volume, from his press in Westminster, two works, The Governayle of Helthe & the Dyetary: with the exception of a cautionary tract against the plague, these are the first medical books printed in English. Caxton’s original is known in but two copies; that in the Bodleian Library, discovered in a volume of old Black Letter tracts, & the Ham House copy, long believed unique, and which is now in the Pierpoint Morgan Library.

“This reprint is of the Dyetary only, verses commonly attributed in early mansucripts to John Lydgate and which Caxton, at the conclusion of the work, called Medicina Stomachi.

“Many of the distichs are free translations from the ‘Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum’ and with variations they are frequently found written on the fly-leaves or margins of old books. The spelling & even the blunders of Caxton’s typesetter have been followed in this, as in the edition of Wynken de Worde & in William Blades’ scarce reprint of 1858.”