Details
MOFFET, Thomas (1553-1604). Insectorum sive Minimorum Animalium Theatrum. Edited by Sir Théodore Turquet de Mayerne. London: Thomas Cotes for Guilielmus Hope, 1634.
2° (295 x 192mm.). Title with woodcut of a beehive and various insects, over 500 woodcut illustrations of insects including the 2 unnumbered leaves of woodcuts at the end. (P2 and P5 browned, slight spotting and occasional marginal staining.) Contemporary vellum with paper label on spine (hinges split).
FIRST EDITION of Moffet's work, which is based on an unpublished manuscript by Conrad Gesner with additions by Edward Wotton and Thomas Penney. The book was ready for the press by 1590, and proofs exist of an elaborate title page dated 1589. However, Moffet was unable to find a printer for the work either in The Hague, as he had originally intended, or in England. After his death in 1604, his apothecary, Darnell, passed the manuscript to de Mayerne, who eventually managed to find a publisher for it in 1634. Since illustrations for the mass-market had to be done cheaply, the book appeared with woodcuts, and without the portraits and title page that Moffet had originally planned. The copy cited by Nissen includes a portrait not found in other descriptions of the work. Nissen ZBI 2852; STC 17993a; Garison and Morton 288; National Library of Medicine, 17th-century Books 8013; Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. 9, pp. 440-1.
2° (295 x 192mm.). Title with woodcut of a beehive and various insects, over 500 woodcut illustrations of insects including the 2 unnumbered leaves of woodcuts at the end. (P2 and P5 browned, slight spotting and occasional marginal staining.) Contemporary vellum with paper label on spine (hinges split).
FIRST EDITION of Moffet's work, which is based on an unpublished manuscript by Conrad Gesner with additions by Edward Wotton and Thomas Penney. The book was ready for the press by 1590, and proofs exist of an elaborate title page dated 1589. However, Moffet was unable to find a printer for the work either in The Hague, as he had originally intended, or in England. After his death in 1604, his apothecary, Darnell, passed the manuscript to de Mayerne, who eventually managed to find a publisher for it in 1634. Since illustrations for the mass-market had to be done cheaply, the book appeared with woodcuts, and without the portraits and title page that Moffet had originally planned. The copy cited by Nissen includes a portrait not found in other descriptions of the work. Nissen ZBI 2852; STC 17993a; Garison and Morton 288; National Library of Medicine, 17th-century Books 8013; Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. 9, pp. 440-1.