The Heir of Bodoni

Colombo, Michele (1747-1838).

Lezioni sulle doti di una colta favella con una non più stampata sullo stile da usarsi oggidì ed altre operette del medesimo autore. Parma, Giuseppe Paganino, 1820.

8° (192x125 mm). Printed on blue paper. [2], v, [1], 191, [1] pages. Small woodcut ornament on the title-page. Contemporary brick-red boards. Smooth spine, title engraved on paper label. Corners worn, joints somewhat abraded, a few cracks to the upper one. A good, uncut copy. Small loss to the blank lower outer corner of the half-title page, not affecting the text. Some light foxing in places. The date ‘6. 9br. 1820’, possibly supplemented with a price notice of ‘2.’ The Hebrew letters .inked on the rear pastedown, in an early nineteenth-century hand ’סבר‘

A handsome copy of the second edition of this work by the abbot Michele Colombo, which first appeared in Milan in 1812 and was awarded by the Florentine Academy of the Crusca in 1817. The copy is housed in its original brick-red editorial boards, which closely recall the bindings executed for the publications printed by the celebrated Giambattista Bodoni. Moreover, after Bodoni’s death in 1813, Giuseppe Paganino was named his successor as director of the Stamperia Ducale at Parma.

The verso of the front flyleaf bears a note written and signed by the printer Paganino stating that ‘Jn questa Carta non se ne sono stampati che venti-tre esemplari’, i.e., only twenty-three copies had been issued on blue paper.

M. Colombo, Alcuni scritti inediti... preceduti dalla vita di lui dettata dal cav. Ang. Pezzana, Parma 1851, pp. 27-28, 35.