Ex-BPH books on auction in Rome

Ex-BPH incunables for sale in Rome.

In June I wrote that some of the more expensive books and incunables that belonged to the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica (Ritman Library), which was dissolved almost a year ago, surfaced at an auction in London. As Brooke Palieri at the 8vo blog noted then, the auctioned material included the 1st edition of Marsilio Ficino’s translation of Corpus Hermeticum, which used to be one of the gems of the Ritman collection. 

Now it appears that other items are very soon (October 11) to be auctioned in Rome, by Bloomsbury Auctions. The BPH items on sale seem to include later 15th century editions of the Hermetic texts, alongside first editions of Iamblichus, Plotinus (in Ficino’s translation – may go for up to € 25,000), early editions of Pico’s works, and much more. Scroll around on the page, and if you have a few (or many) thousand euros to spare this is the chance to get some rare and exotic esoteric books.

Again, this piece of news comes from Brooke Palmieri and the 8vo blog. Big thanks.

Creative Commons License
This blog post by Egil Asprem was first published on Heterodoxology. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Advertisement

Buying back the Corpus Hermeticum?

Corpus Hermeticum first edition, previoulsy in the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, seen for sale in London. (Picture is of another copy).

As previously announced, much of Mr. Ritman’s collection of hermetica and rosicruciana is returning to Amsterdam. After settling some of the debt with Friesland Bank, everything except the ca. 300 most valuable items were returned to the collector of what used to be the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica.

Yesterday, Brooke S. Palmieri at the bibliophile blog 8vo  reported to have seen several of the BPH incunables at the Olympia Book Fair in London, where they were on display at the stand of Shapero Rare Books. According to Palmieri, among the books displayed was the previously mentioned gem of the BPH, Ficino’s 1471 first edition of (the Latin translation of) the Corpus Hermeticum. I have not been able to find the book in Shapero’s online catalog, and do not know whether any of the old BPH books were traded during the fair. Any news on this would be much appreciated.

Read the story at 8vo.

 

Creative Commons License
This blog post by Egil Asprem was first published on Heterodoxology. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

New hope for the Ritman Library?

This morning the Dutch newspaper Trouw brought some promising news about the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, or Ritman Library, which was closed last November. Due to a large  debt and an ensuing conflict between Mr. Joost Ritman, Friesland Bank, and the Dutch State, the collection was dissolved at the end of last year, with one part going to the National Library in the Hague, and another confiscated by the bank.

(more…)
https://heterodoxology.com/tag/corpus-hermeticum/
heterodoxology.com
CC-MAIN-2023-06
132012
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:KGWD46PROKSEZ6ZEKZQ23RA32K274AA4
<urn:uuid:7dbf83fe-9741-4787-897b-30fcc863a345>
2023-02-06T22:30:51Z
192.0.78.24
application/xhtml+xml
sha1:FFAKAUM732TBYDJUEDIUYMFD7EQW37KM
<urn:uuid:0db9c603-0fac-4c2a-8906-6c848564d077>
https://heterodoxology.com/tag/corpus-hermeticum/
response
<urn:uuid:36462787-4212-40ca-8a15-c00f14f8d0a5>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2023-06
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for January/February 2023
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-25
software: Apache Nutch 1.19 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.4-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/