Each novel begins with a seemingly impossible event: The Last Book with the medically inexplicable deaths of several patrons of the Papyrus Bookshop; The Grand Manuscript with the disappearance from a closed, locked room of a famous author and her latest manuscript; Compendium of the Dead with the appearance in the thoroughly guarded rare-book room of the National Library of a second copy of a fifteenth-century
incunabulum known to be unique.
Among their topics are Aeneas Sylvius Picolomini and Leonardo Bruni's translation of Aristotle's Politics, the Byzantine social elite and the market economy from the 11th to the middle 15th century, Renaissance sources in medieval mirrors for princes: Petrarch and Andreas Pannonius, the quest for certainty in fact and faith: Pierre-Daniel Huet and Josephus' Testimonium Flavianum, the reception of Xenophanes' B34 in heathen and Christian antiquity and its sequel in Byzantine thought, and notes from a nominalist in a new
incunabulum by Symphorien Champier.
The sole
incunabulum held at UQAM--Pomponius Mela's Cosmographia, printed in 1482--was donated by the Ecole Normale de Jacques-Cartier.
The final contribution is from the co-editor of the collection, Veronica O'Mara, on the vagaries of the nineteenth-century printer and publisher John Gough Nichols's edition of the fifteenth-century Boy Bishop sermon, characterised as 'the first homiletic
incunabulum to be edited in "modern" times' (p.
Each folio of the
incunabulum contains 10 octaves arranged in 2 columns of 5 octaves apiece.
Ms Ford cites the 541,250 [pounds sterling] achieved in July 2010 for Hartmann Schedel's Chronicle of the World, a richly illustrated
incunabulum of 1493.
Moses Marx makes a strong and multi-faceted argument based on the typography and other internal factors that it is indeed an
incunabulum.
Witty (1978) studied the evolution of indexing practices through the examination of indexes in two fourteenth century manuscripts, an
incunabulum and a book printed in the sixteenth century.
