Jacob

1607 · rif. 91922 — Parisiis Paris Paris: s. n. 1607. Fine. s. n. Parisiis Paris Paris 1607 10.6 x 17.1 cm Relié First edition of the work on ancient Nîmes by Professor Johann Jacob Grasser Swiss by birth but a resident of Nîmes at the time of the publication. A scholar who accumulated titles throughout his life he was poet laureate historian theologian archaeologist and pastor as well as Imperial Count Palatine Knight of the Order of the Golden Spur and Roman Citizen Comes sacri Palatii et Consistorii imperialis Eques Auratus et Civis Romanus. Grasser dedicated this work to his travelling companions Lucas Liechtenhan and Georg Eckenstein. His peregrinations across early seventeenth-century Europe brought him to witness several landmark events of his age among them the execution in 1606 of Henry Garnet one of the conspirators in the notorious Gunpowder Plot. Pastiche binding in brown percaline brown shagreen lettering-piece marbled paper boards with a mottled pattern. Lettering-piece rubbed and lifting at the lower left corner; headcaps board edges and corners very slightly worn. Two tears to the upper portion of the title-page marginally affecting the text; browning and a stain in the margin of the same leaf. A fine copy otherwise. Two stamps to the title-page one armorial the other from the library ""V. Rhedigersch. Stadtbibliothek Breslau."" ""During the three years Grasser spent at Nîmes as a professor at the Collège des Arts he had ample time to study our antiquities and examine them first-hand; accordingly his descriptions and transcriptions are generally accurate at least in the relative sense that the word carried in the sixteenth century. He appends the following description to the two lines of our inscription: In superiori huius tabulæ parte radius quo textores utuntur; inferiore autem forfex visitur; adeo ut liqueat mechanicas artes apud veteres honorifice habitas fuisse p. 76. The term tabula used by Grasser is well chosen and proves that he had seen the stone in person. It is in fact a stele of cold stone no more than a decimetre in thickness."" Eugène Germer-Durand ""Découvertes archéologiques faîtes à Nîmes et dans le Gard pendant l'année 1873. Premier et second semestres"" 1876 our own translation s. n. hardcover