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Not since the days of Falconer Madan and E. Gordon Duff have the results of detailed research on early Oxford printing been published. Now, as the British Museum's cataloguing of English incunabula proceeds, it is possible to give an account of the variants which occur in the second book printed at Oxford—Aristotle's Ethics in the Latin translation of Leonardo Bruni. The book is a small quarto of 174 leaves, the first blank, with signatures a-x8 y6 and with 25 lines to a page. It is not relevant to the present note to argue whether or not Theodoric Rood was the printer of the first three Oxford books: controversy which has raged for years has never settled this point. Meanwhile it does not appear ever to have been noted in print hitherto that the Aristotle of 1479 exists in different states.[1] The variants which I have been able to discover in the British Museum's two copies seemed to be sufficiently numerous and interesting to justify a detailed examination of all known copies. I am very grateful to all the librarians who have answered my questionnaires on this subject.
First, however, it is necessary to re-examine Duff's entry for this book in respect of the number of extant copies. Of the nine copies which he records, only seven can be traced today, with the addition of an eighth in the Broxbourne Library belonging to Mr. and Mrs. Ehrman. There never was a copy in Norwich Public Library, although the Broxbourne copy was formerly in the possession of Norwich Cathedral, which may account for Duff's error. The Earl of Pembroke's copy, sold in 1914, is now in the Chapin Library at Williamstown, Mass. Lord Amherst's copy, wanting four leaves and (says Duff) sold in 1908, I have not traced.[2] Further, the Gesamtkatalog (2373) lists a copy at Cambridge University Library which is in fact a single-leaf fragment; it repeats from Duff
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