Information
Specialist Notes
His career began at the age of 18 as a lyric poet and some of his early lyrics, together with a prose narrative of his love for Beatrice, are here incorporated into a combination of prose and verse. The Vita Nuova contains 42 short chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, 1 ballad and 4 songs; a fifth song is dramatically interrupted by the death of Beatrice. It was completed by 1300. This edition is divided into three parts: the second part is entitled "Canzoni amorose, et morali di Dante Alighieri " on pp. 71-116; the third part has its own frontispiece "Origin, life, studies, and customs of the most illustrious Dante Alighieri (sic)... Made, and compiled by the Illustrious M. Giovanni Boccaccio from Certaldo". It comes dedicated to Bartolomeo Panciatichi,
Mambelli 663: "edition conducted on a Codex by Nicolò Carducci, cited by the Crusca and very rare".
Origin:
CH St. John Hornby collected mainly medieval and Renaissance Italian manuscripts and early printed books. He also amassed important collections of paintings and porcelain. However, he is best known as the founder of the Ashendene Press which, with the Kelmscott and Doves Press, formed the triumvirate of the great private British printers founded in the late 19th century. His work as a private printer illuminates understanding of his book collecting, for the content, lettering, typography and design he so admired in the books he collected were reflected, in to a large extent, in the books he printed. Although Hornby had amassed a group of richly illuminated and decorated Renaissance manuscripts, which would be the primary source of bibliophilic pleasure for most book collectors, in a letter of 5 March 1946 to the English artisan bookbinder Sir Sydney Cockerell, who with Emery Walker and Hornby had designed the Ashendene Press Subiaco type, he declared: ""My Press has been the most absorbing interest of my life."