Nearly a quarter of a millennium ago, Michael Maittaire[1] listed an edition of the Comedies
of
Terence, the imprint of which (it was set forth) proclaimed that the volume
had been printed in Turin by Johannes Fabri on Tuesday, 23 June 1483.
This reference was taken over into the bibliographies of Georg Wolfgang
Panzer,[2] Ludwig Hain,[3] Francesco Cosentini,[4]
and others.[5] It may be of equal interest to recall
that
precisely a century has passed since it was first strongly suggested that the
edition of 1483 was really a supposititious one.
Another edition of Terence from the same press, however, also noted
by the early bibliographers has a very real existence. This bears the
imprint: Turin: Johannes Fabri, Tuesday, 23 June 1478, and may be
identified as Panzer III, 44, 6; Hain 15379; and Cosentini 24. Dr. Dennis
E. Rhodes[6] has shown that, about
the year 1800, two copies of this Terence could be definitely located. The
one which is now in the Biblioteca Nazionale at Turin[7] may (perhaps) be the very copy
which,
prior to 1819, belonged to the Seminario of Asti—but the Robert
Hoblyn-Michael Wodhull[8] one
seems to have completely disappeared from sight. Nevertheless, it is
certain, as Giacomo Manzoni has remarked,[9] that this Terence is truly
"rarissimo,"
and no copy was registered either by the Kommission für den
Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke
[10]
nor in the files of the Centro Nazionale di Informazioni Bibliografiche in
Rome.
[11]
The first, so far as the writer is aware, to question the existence of
the 1483 printing was Manzoni[12]
who, in 1863, declared that "la seconda delle due edizioni è
supposta,
imperocchè, cadendo in martedì il 23 giugno del 1478, non
poteva
il 23 giugno del 1483 cadere nello stesso giorno." The same comment was
also put forward by the British Museum's incunabula catalogue,[13] but here it was more explicitly
asserted
that, in 1483, June 23rd fell on a Monday, not on a Tuesday
as
the colophon specifies. A printer may well go wrong, in his colophon, on
the roman date of the year—as many, indeed, did—but it does
not
seem likely that a craftsman would slip up on so simple and practical a
matter as to the day of the week upon which he completed his
labors.
Manzoni suggested that the origin of this "ghost" might be sought in
a slip made either by Maittaire or by his source, his conjecture being that
the date of 1483 was due to a misreading of "M.cccc.lxxviii" as "M.cccc.
lxxxiii". Quite possibly this may be the true explanation for this date, such
misreadings being common enough in the history of bibliography. But
another explanation may be found in the copy now in the Pierpont Morgan
Library (Accession no. 52923). Here a hole torn in the last leaf makes the
reading of the colophon uncertain, as may be seen in the appended cut.
Clearly the roman date can here be read either as 1478 or 1483, and a
conservative bibliographer, with this copy in hand, might well have judged
the later date to be the more likely one. The Morgan volume thus provides
another possible explanation for the genesis of this ghost edition of Terence,
albeit at best only a speculative one.
